A flame-coloured robe, in which her hands were hidden, covered this person from the feet to where it rose behind her neck in a kind of high ruff-like collar, but in front it was so low or open that it exposed her large breasts. Her skin was darkish and Southern and glowing, almost the colour of honey. Some such dress Jane had seen worn by a Minoan priestess on a vase from old Cnossus. The head, poised motionless on the muscular pillar of her neck, stared straight at Jane. It was a red-cheeked, wet-lipped face, with black eyes-almost the eyes of a cow-and an enigmatic expression. It was not by ordinary standards at all like the face of Mother Dimble; but Jane recognised it at once. It was, to speak like the musicians, the full statement of that theme which had elusively haunted Mother Dimble’s face for the last few hours. It was Mother Dimble’s face with something left out, and the omission shocked Jane. “It is brutal,” she thought, for its energy crushed her; but then she half changed her mind and thought, “It is I who am weak, trumpery.” “It is mocking me,” she thought, but then once more changed her mind and thought, “It is ignoring me. It doesn’t see me”; for though there was an almost ogreish glee in the face, Jane did not seem to be invited to share the joke. She tried to look aside from the face-succeeded-and saw for the first time that there were other creatures present-four or five of them-no, more-a whole crowd of ridiculous little men: fat dwarfs in red caps with tassels on them, chubby, gnome-like little men, quite insufferably familiar, frivolous, and irrepressible. For there was no doubt that they, at any rate, were mocking her. They were pointing at her, nodding, mimicking, standing on their heads, turning somersaults. Jane was not yet frightened; partly because the extreme warmth of the air at this open window made her feel drowsy. It was really quite ridiculous for the time of year. Her main feeling was one of indignation. A suspicion which had crossed her mind once or twice before, now returned to her with irresistible force; the suspicion that the real universe might be simply silly. It was closely mixed up with the memories of that grownup laughter-loud, careless, masculine laughter on the lips of bachelor uncles-which had often infuriated her in childhood, and from which the intense seriousness of her school debating society had offered such a grateful escape.
But a moment later she was very frightened indeed. The giantess rose. They were all coming at her. With a great glow and a noise like fire the flame-robed woman and the malapert dwarfs had all come into the house. They were in the room with her. The strange woman had a torch in her hand. It burned with terrible, blinding brightness, cracking, and sent up a cloud of dense black smoke, and filled the bedroom with a sticky, resinous smell. “If they’re not careful,” thought Jane, “they’ll set the house on fire.” But she had hardly time to think of that for her whole attention was fixed by the outrageous behaviour of the little men. They began making hay of the room. In a few seconds the bed was a mere chaos, the sheets on the floor, the blankets snatched up and used by the dwarfs for tossing the fattest of their company, the pillows hurtling through the air, feathers flying everywhere.
“Look out! Look out, can’t you?” shouted Jane, for the giantess was beginning to touch various parts of the room with her torch. She touched a vase on the mantelpiece. Instantly there rose from it a streak of colour which Jane took for fire. She was just moving to try to put it out when she saw that the same thing had happened to a picture on the wall. And then it happened faster and faster all round her. The very top-knots of the dwarfs were now on fire. But just as the terror of this became unbearable, Jane noticed that what was curling up from everything the torch had touched was not flame after all, but vegetation. Ivy and honeysuckle were growing up the legs of the bed, red roses were sprouting from the caps of the little men, and from every direction huge lilies rose to her knees and waist, shooting out their yellow tongues at her. The smells, the heat, the crowding, and the strangeness made her feel faint. It never occurred to her to think she was dreaming. People mistake dreams for visions: no one ever mistook a vision for a dream . . .
“Jane! Jane!” said the voice of Mrs. Dimble suddenly.
“What on earth is the matter?”
Jane sat up. The room was empty, but the bed had all been pulled to pieces. She had apparently been lying on the floor. She felt cold and very tired.
“What has happened?” repeated Mrs. Dimble.
“I don’t know,” said Jane.
“Are you ill, child?” asked Mother Dimble.
“I must see the Director at once,” said Jane. “It’s all right. Don’t bother. I can get up by myself . . . really. But I’d like to see the Director at once.”
III
Mr. Bultitude’s mind was as furry and as unhuman in shape as his body. He did not remember, as a man in his situation would have remembered, the provincial zoo from which he had escaped during a fire, nor his first snarling and terrified arrival at the Manor, nor the slow stages whereby he had learned to love and trust its inhabitants. He did not know that he loved and trusted them now. He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Indeed he did not know that he existed at all: everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognise either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred and he tasted it. And that was all. Hence his loves might, if you wished, be all described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices that reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of the beast’s sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the colours of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, unattached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life.
To-day an unusual thing had happened to him-he had got out into the garden without being muzzled. He was always muzzled out of doors, not because there was any fear of his becoming dangerous but because of his partiality for fruit and for the sweeter kinds of vegetables.
“’Tisn’t that he’s not tame,” as Ivy Maggs had explained to Jane Studdock “but that he isn’t honest. He wouldn’t leave us a thing if we let him have the run of his teeth.” But to-day the precaution had been forgotten and the bear had passed a very agreeable morning investigating the turnips. Now-in the early afternoon-he had approached the garden wall. There was a chestnut tree within the wall which the bear could easily climb, and from its branches he could drop down on the far side. He was standing looking up at this tree. Mrs. Maggs would have described his state of mind by saying, “He knows perfectly well he’s not allowed out of the garden.” That was not how it appeared to Mr. Bultitude. He had no morals: but the Director had given him certain inhibitions. A mysterious reluctance arose, a clouding of the emotional weather, when the wall was too close; but mixed with this there was an opposite impulse to get beyond that wall. He did not, of course, know why, and was incapable even of raising the question. If the pressure behind this impulse could be translated into human terms at all, it would appear as something more like mythology than a thought. One met bees in the garden, but never found a bee-hive. The bees all went away over the wall. And to follow bees was the obvious thing to do. I think there was a s
ense in the bear’s mind-one could hardly call it a picture-of endless green lands beyond the wall, and hives innumerable, and bees the size of sparrows, and waiting there, or else walking, trickling, oozing to meet one, something or someone stickier, sweeter, more golden than honey itself.
To-day, this unrest was upon him in an unusual degree. He was missing Ivy Maggs. He did not know that there was any such person and he did not remember her as we know remembering, but there was an unspecified lack in his experience. She and the Director were, in their different ways, the two main factors in his existence. He felt, in his own fashion, the supremacy of the Director. Meetings with him were to the bear what mystical experiences are to men, for the Director had brought back with him from Venus some shadow of man’s lost prerogative to ennoble beasts. In his presence Mr. Bultitude trembled on the very borders of personality, thought the unthinkable and did the impossible, was troubled and enraptured with gleams from beyond his own woolly world, and came away tired. But with Ivy he was perfectly at home-as a savage who believes in some remote High God is more at home with the little deities of wood and water. It was Ivy who fed him, chased him out of forbidden places, cuffed him, and talked to him all day long. It was her firm conviction that the creature “understood every word she said.” If you took this literally it was untrue; but in another sense it was not so wide of the mark. For much of Ivy’s conversation was the expression not of thought but of feeling, and of feelings Mr. Bultitude almost shared-feelings of alacrity, snugness, and physical affection. In their own way they understood one another pretty well.
Three times Mr. Bultitude turned away from the tree and the wall, but each time he came back. Then, very cautiously and. quietly, he began to climb the tree. When he got up into the fork he sat there for a long time. He saw beneath him a steep grassy bank descending to a road. The desire and the inhibition were now both very strong. He sat there for nearly half an hour. Sometimes his mind wandered from the point and once he nearly went to sleep. In the end he got down on the outside of the wall. When he found that the thing had really happened he became so frightened that he sat still at the bottom of the grassy bank on the very edge of the road. Then he heard a noise.
A motor van came into sight. It was driven by a man in the livery of the N.I.C.E. and another man in the same livery sat beside him.
“Hullo . . . I say!” said the second man. “Pull up, Sid. What about that?”
“What?” said the driver.
“Haven’t you got eyes in your head?” said the other.
“Gor,” said Sid, pulling up. “A bloody great bear. I say-it couldn’t be our own bear, could it?’’
“Get on,” said his mate. “She was in her cage all right this morning.”
“You don’t think she could have done a bunk? There’d be hell to pay for you and me . . .”
“She couldn’t have got here if she had done a bunk. Bears don’t go forty miles an hour. That ain’t the point. But hadn’t we better pinch this one?”
“We haven’t got no orders,” said Sid.
“No. And we haven’t failed to get that blasted wolf either, have we?”
“Wasn’t our fault. The old woman what said she’d sell wouldn’t sell, as you’re there to witness, young Len. We did our best. Told her that experiments at Belbury weren’t what she thought. Told her the brute would have the time of its life and be made no end of a pet. Never told so many lies in one morning in my life. She’d been got at by someone.”
“Course it wasn’t our fault. But the boss won’t take no notice of that. It’s get on or get out at Belbury.”
“Get out?” said Sid. “I wish to hell I knew how to.” Len spat over the side and there was a moment’s silence.
“Anyway,” said Sid presently, “what’s the good of taking a bear back?”
“Well, isn’t it better than coming back with nothing?” said Len. “And bears cost money. I know they want another one. And here it is free.”
“All right,” said Sid ironically, “if you’re so keen on it, just hop out and ask him to step in.”
“Dope,” said Len.
“Not on my bit of dinner, you don’t,” said Sid.
“You’re a bucking good mate to have,” said Len, groping in a greasy parcel. “It’s a good thing for you I’m not the sort of chap who’d split on you.”
“You done it already,” said the driver. “I know all your little games.”
Len had by this time produced a thick sandwich and was dabbing it with some strong-smelling liquid from a bottle. When it was thoroughly saturated, he opened the door and went a pace forward, still holding the door in one hand. He was now about six yards from the bear, which had remained perfectly still ever since it saw them. He threw the sandwich to it.
Quarter of an hour later Mr. Bultitude lay on his side, unconscious and breathing heavily. They had no difficulty in tying up his mouth and all four paws, but they had great difficulty in lifting him into the van.
“That’s done something to my ticker,” said Sid, pressing his hand to his left side.
“Curse your ticker,” said Len, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes. “Come on.”
Sid climbed back into the driving seat, sat still for a few seconds, panting and muttering “Christ” at intervals. Then he started his engine up and they drove away.
IV
For some time now Mark’s waking life was divided between periods by the Sleeper’s bedside and periods in the room with the spotted ceiling. The training in objectivity which took place in the latter cannot be described fully. The reversal of natural inclination which Frost inculcated was not spectacular or dramatic, but the details would be unprintable and had, indeed, a kind of nursery fatuity about them which is best ignored. Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing: but laughter was unhappily out of the question. There indeed lay the horror-to perform petty obscenities which a very silly child might have thought funny all under the unchangingly serious inspection of Frost, with a stop watch and a note-book and all the ritual of scientific experiment. Some of the things he had to do were merely meaningless. In one exercise he had to mount the step-ladder and touch some one spot on the ceiling, selected by Frost: just touch it with his forefinger and then come down again. But either by association with the other exercises or because it really concealed some significance, this proceeding always appeared to Mark to be the most indecent and even inhuman of all his tasks. And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it became a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him-something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.
The other thing that helped to save him was the Man in the Bed. Mark’s discovery that he really could speak English had led to a curious acquaintance with him. It can hardly be said that they conversed. Both spoke, but the result was hardly conversation as Mark had hitherto understood the term. The man was so very allusive and used gesture so extensively that Mark’s less sophisticated modes of communication were almost useless. Thus when Mark explained that he had no tobacco, the man had slapped an imaginary tobacco pouch on his knee at least six times and struck an imaginary match about as often, each time jerking his head sideways with a look of such relish as Mark had seldom seen on a human face. Then Mark went on to explain that though “they” were not foreigners, they were extremely dangerous people and that probably the Stranger’s best plan would be to preserve his silence.
“Ah,” said the Stranger jerking his head again. “Ah. Eh?” And then, without exactly laying his finger on his lips he wen
t through an elaborate pantomime which clearly meant the same thing. And it was impossible for a long time to get him off this subject. He went back and back to the theme of secrecy. “Ah,” he said, “don’t get nothing out of me. I tell ’ee. Don’t get nothing out of me. Eh? I tell ’ee. You and me knows. Ah?” and his look embraced Mark in such an apparently gleeful conspiracy that it warmed the heart. Believing this matter to be now sufficiently clear Mark began, “But, as regards the future-” only to be met by another pantomime of secrecy, followed by the word “Eh?” in a tone which demanded an answer.
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