She smiled again. “Shouting’s a better word. I couldn’t catch more than one phrase, though—one you kept repeating.”
His lips felt dry and he tried to moisten them with his tongue. He forced himself to smile again and strove vainly to remember what the dream had been about and could only recapture a sort of fear which was different from the other fears.
“Perhaps the other words were in Swedish?” He fought to make this seem natural. “It is a language that sounds . . . strange.”
She shook her head. “Oh, no—it was all English. But I could only catch the words of that one phrase. I think you must have been back in childhood. You sounded as if you were trying to explain something you’d done. You kept saying: ‘It’s true! It’s true!’ Or perhaps the word was ‘truth’—I’m not sure. And then you’d say, ‘I thought I was saying lies’—I remember that because ‘saying lies’ is odd—‘I thought I was saying lies but they were truths!’” She straightened the bed-covers and sat in the chair.
“Remember now?” she said.
It was night and the light on the trees outside was silver instead of gold. It was time, nearly, for him to sleep. He did not want to sleep after the experience of the afternoon. But neither did he want to lie wakeful and thinking. He had been thinking for every lone moment he had had since she had told him the words he had been saying in his dream.
He still could not remember the dream but only the fear and doubt and black anxiety of it. But that did not matter. It was the thought behind those words which mattered and the inescapable truth of the thought. He must face it now.
He faced it—and was none the better. His mind raced, and doubled upon its tracks and raced again. And there seemed no goal reached or reachable. But the thought was still there—and the fact and truth of the thought: he had been trumpeting truth while so blinded that he had thought himself vomiting falsehood. And the last of his lies had pierced through his own mind and impaled him like a collector’s moth—“. . . to keep the right to think as they think, not as other people tell them they must think!”
That was true. There was no escape: it was true. Men, to be higher than the animals, must think their own thoughts, and out of their collective thought must inevitably come, in the last analysis, the only form of rule which was right. Two and two make four. Ice freezes and fire burns. The only ruler of any grouping of men must be the Highest Common Factor of all the minds in that grouping, not an arbitrary algebraic symbol which poses itself as the master of other minds. Black is black and white unalterably white—and Truth, even when disguised as falsity, must always be Truth. . . .
His mind raced—and he groaned and twisted his body about until his legs hurt in the clumsy casts and he was drenched with sweat. His mind raced—and brought no solution of the appalling problem which was facing him. . . .
Clare came into the room.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did you think I was never coming?”
And then she saw his face, and the lightness went from her voice and she stood looking down at him with shocked and anxious eyes.
He was going to speak—but she moved, going away from him towards the wall-cupboard where were kept all the paraphernalia of nursing. He turned his head to watch her and the grace of her body and movement brought a swift constriction to his throat. She wore a long dress of some filmy, glittering stuff which was blue and silver and floated about her.
She came back to the bedside and moved the chair closer and sat in it and leaned towards him. Against the gleaming stuff of the dress her neck and shoulders glowed softly. There was a little shining metal case between her fingers and she was unscrewing its cap. She said:
“If you have any fever, we must call the doctor. At once. I’m worried about you.”
He would not let her finish. He caught at her hand and she stared at him suddenly with wide eyes which were afraid.
She set the thermometer down upon the low table and looked carefully at what she was doing.
He said: “Please, we should talk about us . . .” and was interrupted.
“No,” she said. “No!” She did not struggle to free the hand but let it lie still in his. She said:
“It’s . . . it’s too soon?”
He suddenly knew that his grip was too tight upon her fingers and relaxed it. He stared at her in silence. She raised her head and looked at him but not into his eyes. She said, very low:
“Don’t you understand? It’s too soon to talk. I . . . I’m not lying—or being evasive—or being . . . being . . .” Her voice broke a little. She said:
“I’m not evading! But it’s too soon!”
He felt a sudden but more peaceful weakness. He said at last:
“I understand,” and laid his head back upon the pillow and closed his eyes.
After a while she moved her hand, gently and experimentally, and he let his open, lax and inert. He breathed deeply and turned his head away from her so that his face was m shadow. There was no sound or movement for a long time, but he went on feigning sleep. . . .
She was gone—and he did not have to pretend any longer.
He found passivity unendurable and reached out to the bedside table for matches and a cigarette.
The tobacco tasted bitter and unpleasing, but he smoked determinedly. He must not sleep—and he dared not yet let his mind go racing again around the mad whirligig of his dilemma.
He thought of Clare—and had reached a sort of desperately excited peace when he stumbled, unaware, over a memory. The sweat burst out cold upon his forehead and he sat suddenly and violently upright.
He had discovered why the date—the newly found and realizable date of the month—had filled him this morning with formless foreboding.
It was the date of the fifth ‘attack’ in Altinger’s chain! And, by this time, it was already fact—and the giant unbelievable fires were leaping up to the sky unquenchable, and in the hell around their feet were the charred and twisted and crumbling remains of men’s work and minds and bodies, of men’s women and children and little homes. . . .
Outside the windows, the velvet, silver-shot blackness began to thin: it grew grey and the silver paled to blend with the greyness and lose its beauty. There were faint stirrings in the trees and a sudden pre-dawn chill was in the air.
He shivered. He lay flat and motionless and stared upwards with wide-open eyes which saw nothing. All his body was trembling, but he was not conscious of his body. All his mind was a pulsating, flaming question—what shall I do? . . .
The chill went from the air and the stirrings in the trees changed into lusty, full-throated singing and the greyness became transmuted into gold—and Otto Falken, with a sudden access of strength, fought with his rebellious mind and once more was in command of it.
He knew that he must find an answer—the answer. He had known that all the time, but now he knew more; he knew that without sleep and the healing of his body no answer which was right would come.
He had to fight for the mastery—but at last he slept.
When he waked the sun was high. Lena stood by his bed and looked down at him with a smile which seemed hampered by some inner anxiety. He stretched himself and answered the smile. He felt better than he had expected to feel. Lena said:
“We were sure awonderin’ when you’d be wakin’, Mizr Johnson. We was right worried, Miz Clare an’ me!”
He kept the smile on his face—and carefully did not look at the folded morning paper which lay upon the bedside table. He said: