Ringstones

(1)

I gave webs back the exercise book when we went up to his attic room again after breakfast. He took it and sat staring at the cover of it, frowning, not saying anything. It's always embarrassing to have to say something about an amateur's composition, and even though, in this case, it wasn't Piers's own, I did not want to hurt his feelings by dismissing the girl's story too casually. I erred on the side of caution.

“What I admire is the industry. The sheer hard labour of filling that book with writing is something that I feel would be beyond me at any rate. True, the thing is not finished, it seems: left in the air, rather. But still...”

“You don't think it's finished?” he looked up quickly.

“Well, I suppose the inference is: 'And then I woke up—with my toe fast in the bed−rail', or something like that. I suppose that's an acceptable end to a story. I don't know.”

Piers nodded. “If it is a story,” he said, but before I could ask him what he meant by that he added, “But doesn't anything strike you about the contents of the thing? The plot, if you like?”

We were approaching, I could see, the sort of discussion I wanted to avoid, so I took a side−track into something nearer my own territory, where I felt safer. The thing that had struck me, I told him, was the amount of browsing Daphne Hazel must have done among books of a sort which I shouldn't have thought would normally appeal to such a girl as I had imagined her to be. And, I said, hoping a man may be forgiven for hearing the buzzing of the bees in his own bonnet as somewhat louder than those in his neighbour's, I was curious to know where she got hold of that name for the boy.

“Couldn't she have invented that, if she invented the rest?”

“Well,” I said, “she might have invented it, and by sheer coincidence dropped on a real, ancient Syrian name, but...”

Piers sat up, and, of course, needing little encouragement, I lectured briefly on the historical occurrences of the name and its probable application in ancient Syrian mythology to the same divinity who was also called Tammuz and whose memory—the point is irrelevant but interesting—is preserved in the modern Syrian and Hebrew names of the month July. More interesting, though perhaps equally irrelevant, I suggested, is the equivalence of Syrian Nu'man or Tammuz with the Greek Adonis, who is, again, the Eastern Adonai, the Lord, or King. A common flower in Mount Lebanon, if our Professor of Arabic is to be believed (which some have doubted) is the Red Anemone; and those flowers are known to the natives as 'Shaqa'iq un Nu'man', the sisters of Nu'man. Which, of course, is what Flecker was thinking of—

His father was Adonis,

Who dwells away in Lebanon, in stony Lebanon, Where blooms his red anemone.

Piers stared hard at the idea he chose for convenience to see written on my face for a long time, then: “She does make the point,” he said, “that that wasn't his real name.”

“Here,” said I, “gimme the book again, I missed the Shaggy Dog somewhere.”

He ignored my levity. “There's something about the pronunciation, isn't there?” he said.

I was pleased that he had spotted that. “Now, that is interesting to me,” I said. “Somewhere your friend Miss Hazel has come across a remark about the peculiar difficulty any Christian larynx has in pronouncing the letter ''ain' which forms the second consonant of the name Nu'man. I was struck by her putting that in. I wonder what she's been reading? It sounds rather as though she's been dipping into an Arabic grammar somewhere. I begin to have a great respect for your friend.”

Piers put the exercise book carefully on the table beside him and stood up. I was mystified by his manner. Daphne Hazel's excursion into fiction seemed to be worrying him out of all proportion. Then he began tapping his toe on the little iron fender round the hearthstone.

“That's it!” he exclaimed. “That is it! I couldn't have known that myself, because I don't know any Eastern language. I thought you might be able to see something there that I couldn't. Of course, she heard the name.”

“Heard it? Instead of getting it out of a book? Well, she might have done. Come to think of it, if she'd got it out of a grammar she might have written the ''ain' in a more scientific way. The grammars give lots of good advice about how to write it in English characters but none that's any use about how to pronounce it. But it's scarcely a point that you sensitive students of literature would consider important, is it? Fascinating as it may be to a pedant like myself.”

“Of course it's important,” he said, turning on me in some agitation. “Why should a girl like Daphne write all that and send it off to me without preface or explanation?”

“Well that,” I replied, not able to help grinning, “is just the question I politely refrained from asking. I suppose we all have an itch to shine in something that's not our own metier. Your Daphne, who, I'll warrant, can creak a joint with any gymnast in the Kingdom, has a secret craving to cut as handsome a figure in print as she does on your wall−bars, your vaulting−horses, your parallel bars, beams, ropes and what else have you that takes the place of the racks and strappados of a less refined age. Why man, you scratch the same itch yourself. It's the right cacoethes, and time's the only D.D.T. I should simply say that her job at what's−its−name, this place, didn't give her enough to do. She was probably lonely, She amused herself by writing this, and as you're probably the most sympathetic person she knows, she sent it to you.”

Piers shook his head. “I know her well enough,” he said. “At school she never wrote anything—I mean, of that sort, imaginative. She can express herself well enough and she has read a lot. But, as I told you last night, inventing fairy stories is quite out of character in her. She just wouldn't have invented that story.”

“Well she did. There it is. Unless she wrote it down from dictation or copied it from a book for some utterly unimaginable reason I don't see any other answer but that her imagination is capable of getting up to tricks that you never suspected. And, though I know little about the imagination and less about young women, it's not improbable that their fancies may fetch a frisk or two in private that you and I might never see but for some such whim as this.”

“You don't see any other answer?” “No, do you?”

“Yes. The answer I see is that this is not invented. It's a record of something that happened.”

I expostulated. But my mind is less subtle than Piers's, or I haven't his practice in resolving ambiguities, allegories and the contradictions of actual and imaginative experience. I fear I did not altogether understand his argument that though the narration of incidents in Daphne's story might not, or could not, be a description of actual events which occurred, yet the experience dictating the form and character of the fancied events must have occurred; and, the choice of symbols in which to represent an experience depending intimately on the experience itself, the interpretation of the idlest fancies must reveal an active truth. Dimly I could see what might be troubling Piers, but the chimaeras he was tracking seemed to me to be denizens of a region of the mind too remote and mysterious for my plain conducted−tour kind of psychology to dream of venturing into. I can box the compass of sense with any man and do my bit of hawk−spotting between the cardinal points besides; but Piers was trying to make the needle point to a three hundred and sixty−first degree within the circle.

“Nay, Piers,” I said in the end. “All these subtleties and hair−splittings, all these attempts to prove that black and white are interchangeable and that truth's only to be known by falsehood and cabbages to be recognised through a knowledge of kings, why, all this is but to say that if the lass has begun imagining things she never did before something has happened to make her.”

“Well, I am saying that!” he cried.

“Why then,” I said, “since it seems to prey on your mind, though I'm damned if I quite see why, there's only one thing to be done and that's to ask her why she wrote it.”

“Good!” said Piers with quite an ominous note of satisfaction in his voice, and at once substituting action for argument he yanked a chair out of the way and reached down a bundle of Ordnance maps from the top of his cupboard. I began to commend the postal services, but protested with less and less vigour as he sorted out the right map and spread it out on the table.

“There, you see,” he pointed out, “is Staineshead. We can go by train with a couple of changes, but I expect the bus is easier. We'll go down to the Haymarket and find out the times. Now, where's Ringstones? Ah! here it is. You see there's a footpath marked from Staineshead over Nither Edge, and a bridle road from Ringstones Hall to Blagill. And the Stone Circle is marked, too.”

So it was. All as our author related: even to the loop of the beck round Ringstones Park and the Roman mine in the valley below.

“Well go to Staineshead and then up the path to Ringstones,” Piers said.

“And being much cleverer at that sort of thing than the heroine,” I commented, “we shall not get lost. Nor shall I go up to my backside in a bog−hole. Oh no! Nothing like that. I've been over moors with you before. However, it's a jaunt, and if the wench is in jeopardy no Knight Errant, or erring, ought to boggle at a few marish wastes and deserts wild. Let me draw a dragon or two on the map just for the sake of appearances while you work out the distances between pubs. But,” it occurred to me to point out, while he stared at the map like a hungry bloodhound at a bit of black−pudding in a porkshop window, “but do you know for a fact that this job of hers was at Ringstones Hall?”

“She says so,” he replied, refusing to be drawn from the map. The point, however, seemed to me of some importance. Had she ever actually given the address of this place she was going to? In a letter, I meant, apart from the story in the book.

He lifted his head at last.

“Well, no,” he said. “The last letter I had from her was from Towerton. She said the place was near Staineshead. That's all. Well, Ringstones Hall is near Staineshead.”

I looked at those contours and that dotted line drawn with a confidence I have learned to mistrust in Ordnance maps and observed that if it was only twice as far as it looked I should count myself lucky. “Well, but,” I persisted, after some aspersions on my map−reading which there is no point in repeating, “what about the book itself? The postmark?”

So we hunted until we found the brown paper it had been wrapped in. The post−mark would have defied a better epigraphist than I am. There was indeed a 't' in it, or something uncommon like a 't'. But so there is in Timbuctoo. I abandoned that line of enquiry.

“We can make a loop,” said Piers, who had reverted to the map, “either by going on from Ringstones to Blagill or cutting across Blagill Moor, down on to the road, and back into Staineshead. We'll stay the night at a pub in Staineshead.”

The last remark was made with quite unjustifiable assurance. Piers still believes, in spite of the weight of evidence from Joseph of Nazareth onwards, that an inn is a place where you can be put up merely for showing the colour of your money. However, Northern farmers are hospitable though landlords are surly, and, as the Highlander said in reference to the lack of another sort of accommodation, “Och, leddy, there's always the hill.” It looked good country beyond Staineshead. The fine sunny weather was holding out astonishingly. I didn't think it mattered a damn whether we visited Daphne Hazel or not, but if Piers was so keen to see her I felt it was not beyond the powers of two able−bodied young men to discover the whereabouts of a Towerton girl, given a small place like Staineshead as a centre for the search. What sort of fools we looked when we found her was Piers's affair.

So we packed our rucksacks that evening and asked Mr. Debourg, with a firmness which I hoped I should feel the next morning also, to call us at five−thirty.

(2)

I tried to finish my night's rest in the bus, but it was a gesture—a bit of pitiful human defiance of the pitiless mechanical gods—and nothing more. It is perfectly logical, I suppose, that the more and bigger machines there are, the less room there is on this earth for human beings. But I do sometimes mildly wonder why it is that, although roads grow monthly wider and motor vehicles more enormous, though the adjectival noun 'luxury' is applied as a matter of course to the substantive 'coach', all the technical skill of the modern factory, backed presumably by centuries of experience in making things to measure for the human frame, has not succeeded in producing a bus where the leg−space is not one inch shorter than the average human femur and the seat space by just about the same amount too narrow to accommodate two average human pelvises placed side by side. Before Piers and I reached Staineshead the correct interpretation of the term 'luxury' had occurred to me. The adjective implies, of course, sumptuousness and opulence of appearance. Those tall−backed seats with curving lines, that wealth of plush and imitation leather, those chromium−plated knobs and ash−trays: such magnificence of upholstery, such generous filling of the available space with solid furnishings is indeed luxurious, but it has to be admired from the outside. A little further development and we shall have reached the point of perfection in buses; the point where the interstices into which passengers now insinuate themselves are no longer available to harbour such intruders but filled, they too, with luxurious appointments.

Piers, who was pondering other matters, did not treat these reflections very sympathetically. He ascribed them merely to my having been levered out of bed three hours before my usual time and promised me leg−stretching enough before the day was out. He paid just enough attention to my argument to demolish it by pointing out that if space, on my own showing was a valuable commodity to me, it was no less so to the bus company and we had as much of it as the price of our tickets entitled us to in these expensive times. Then he dismissed the subject for the more important one of Daphne Hazel's story.

All the same, he was as glad as I was to get out at Staineshead. I believe he had been there once before. At any rate, he wasted no time casting about for our way out but set off down the main street and across the bridge over the Nither and up a twisting lane or two to the edge of the town before he bothered to open the map. From that point, where we mounted a stone stile and took a path up a rough pasture towards Nither Edge, we had all the space we desired. I can never get among these hills of the North without their reaffirming my hold on an old conviction that space and silence are the most precious and least valued gifts left to us, in this crowded age, from the heritage of an ampler world. I mourn man's unhappy compulsion to fill them at all costs and with whatever rubbish comes handiest. I console myself with the reflection that, so far as the rape of space goes, it's but a late stage of a process that began with the first axe and the first plough. After the plough, the enclosures; after the wholesale conscription of open field and common to the cause of more economic exploitation, the ruthless trimming that pares away the lovely but uneconomic margins of our country lanes and roots out the extravagance of hedgerows. The rough and reedy pastures that slope up to Nither Edge, and the open moor beyond it still represent a bit of the old, casual, almost incidental way of exploiting land. As we climbed the wide and lonely hill, looking up to the tumbled battlements of dark grey boulders, aloof and hard against the summer sky, I greeted the freedom of the hill with something of reverence and compassion, as Caesar (one hopes) may have returned the salutation of those about to die. The next time I go that way, if ever I go again, I shall find Ringstones Moor turned into a plantation of pit−props or a tank training area.

We stopped to rest on the Edge, perching ourselves on one of the great rounded slabs of millstone grit with all the quiet Nither valley, a sober tartan of green fields intersected by black stone dykes, at our feet and the tangled, undulating brown, green and grey plain of the moor at our backs. Piers pored over the map. With his usual luck, which he calls skill, he had hit the right footpath out of Staineshead. It was evidently little used, and I thought little of our chances of being able to keep to it all the way across the moor to Ringstones. But there was not much fear of our getting lost. With a good map, a compass (which Piers usually carries with him on our expeditions) and a clear day, we might find ourselves toiling over some rough ground, but it was improbable that we should miss the Hall altogether.

As it happened, we lost the path a good many times, for it melted away every so often into a wide patch of heather or an expanse of quaking bog, and more than once eluded us in a maze of brown hillocks and holes. Some of these places were exceedingly difficult to get across dry−shod, and, as usual, after a time I got tired of tussock−jumping and just splodged through, with the inevitable result that soon I misjudged the depth of one spongy bit and went well over the knees into the bog. When I caught up with Piers I found him standing looking back at the tract we had just picked our way through. It was a broad depression in the moor, most of it bare of heather. Between the brown pools and pallid mosses the ground was naked peat, frosted, as it were, with some kind of salty exudation. Here and there a few bleached heather roots writhed up out of the peat like twisted skeleton hands. Even under a sunny sky it was one of the loneliest−looking bits of moor I have ever set eyes on. Piers remarked that this must be the place.

There was very little, it seemed to me, to identify it with any particular place—it was just a bit left over from the raw material of Creation. But then, recollecting that he was making the assumption that Daphne Hazel's story had some kind of truth, I saw what he meant I looked round and imagined myself alone there on a cloudy grey day. I should not have liked to be alone there. I wonder why we call a moor 'dreary'? It seems as little descriptive of the true character of such a region as calling a tiger 'undomesticated'. Dreariness is a human product. If I were looking for real dreariness I should go for a tour round the outskirts of Leeds or Manchester or Sheffield, where clinkery drabness falls with such a weight it would knock holes in the bottom of your soul. There's no comparison between that Waste Land and the lonely mountain. There is power in the emptiness of the hills; and it's a hostile power. One old tin−can lying on the ground would have made all the difference. But there was no tin−can: what we could see was all so powerfully un−human as to be able to erase our knowledge of its narrow limits. What existed was what we saw; and it was the same old menacing wilderness through which the Paleolithic hunter stumbled with backward glances at pursuing shadows—cold, hunger and death.

I agreed with Piers. It might well have been the very place where Daphne Hazel lost her way. I held my soaked trousers from my legs and conceded that I might well have found the very same bog−hole.

I noticed that Piers looked carefully about him on the ground as we moved on again; and once he stopped to stare at some faint marks on a patch of bare soil. I imagine he thought he had found a footprint; but Chingachgook and his son Uncas together, with Leatherstocking to help them, couldn't have said whether it was one or not. I told him so. Piers said nothing, and we carried on. We found the path again after a while; or at least a path. It seemed to run in the general direction that we wanted and so we followed it, winding and twisting through the heather over the waves of the moor. We came after some time to a little runlet of water flowing away to our left which must undoubtedly run into the Ringstones beck, and then, as we topped a low rise beyond this, Piers stopped and pointed. Less than half a mile ahead and somewhat to the right of our line of march was a round area, higher than the surrounding moor and plainly to be distinguished for being clothed with grass while all round it was heather; and, more conspicuous still, scattered about that green patch stood a number of great dark, upright stones. Piers studied the map and cast his eyes all round, checking our position. I complimented him on his navigation. There before us was the very Stone Circle indicated by gothic lettering on the Ordnance map.

We made straight for it, and soon we were sitting side by side on a large flat oblong stone lying within the circle. I pointed out the dip in the ridge which formed our Eastern horizon and remarked that Daphne's description was sufficiently accurate. Piers jumped up. “Yes,” I agreed, “this must be the Altar Stone itself. But I shouldn't have any scruples about resting your hinder end on it. The sheep seem to have treated it with less delicacy than old man what's−his−name.” I did my best to recall the description of the place in Daphne's story and, as I did so, recollected one particular that at once seemed to me to prove that she could not have seen the place with her own eyes. I mentioned it to Piers. But he thought I was referring to the clearing of the heather from the Stone Circle to the end of the Ringstones's private road. Of that, of course, there was no trace, and Piers began to explain again what he meant by imaginative and objective truth.

“No, no,” said I. “I'm thinking only of the grass here in the circle. Doesn't she write that it was smooth and close−cropped? Well, it's as rough and tussocky as any old bit of moorland. I should say she had the description of the place from the old fellow who told her what it was like when he was a boy, perhaps, when the place was kept tidy.”

Piers shook his head, and I don't know whether he thought my suggestion sensible or not. We strolled together to the edge of the circle on the side towards the hollow where Ringstones Hall ought to lie. From there you scarcely perceived that there was a valley between the moor where the Stone Circle stands and the hill beyond. I noticed the bridle road from Blagill across the moor to our right, and saw where it dipped out of sight in front of us.

We picked our way across from the Stone Circle by a very faint and uncertain path, turned down the bridle road, which showed very little sign of use, and then, quite suddenly, saw the hill fall away before us to a steep−sided little valley. It was a surprising view: a deep cup in the moor, green and wooded; an open space of park−land in the middle and, towards the South−Eastern side, a stone house and outbuildings. We stopped and looked down. There seemed to be no one about. The only moving things were some cattle in the park.

“Well,” I asked Piers, “what's your plan of campaign now we've got here?”

“Why,” said he, “what's wrong with ringing the bell and asking to see Miss Hazel?”

“Nowt. Nowt at all,” said I. “If we're lucky Dr Ravelin's old−world courtesy may extend to asking us to luncheon.”

“It can hardly not extend to asking us in to see a friend, anyway,” said Piers.

So down the hill we went. I quite forgot at the time to look out for the traces of Dr Ravelin's earthworks beside that rough, narrow lane. But as I remember the hillside now, so rough, so overgrown with bracken, ling and scrubby little thorn bushes and tufts of young birches, I doubt whether I could have succeeded in seeing any prehistoric embankment there though I had remembered and searched and stared all day. As we approached the level ground of the park it became obvious that Daphne Hazel had exercised to the full the artist's privilege of improving on nature. Like any new recruit to an order, perhaps, she had been quicker to learn its privileges than its duties. In the first place, the park was a good deal smaller than her story had led me to imagine; secondly, it was nothing like so trim and cared−for as I had pictured it. In fact, it was a sadly neglected little wilderness. Half the great trees were down, the shrubberies were scrub, the open lawns untended, rough with weeds and rushes and poached by the hooves of the red bullocks that turned their heads to follow us with slow stares as we passed. Near the bottom of the hill a tumbledown stone dyke which had once, no doubt, been the park boundary wall was sketchily mended with posts and wire, which were also strung across the road to keep the cattle from straying. We straddled over and went across the park proper towards the house. Half−way across we set up a covey of partridges from the rough grass by the side of the drive.

Once down the hill you cannot see the Hall itself until you are almost upon it, the trees having been so planted and the drive so windingly traced as to give the impression that the park is bigger than it really is. Neither of us spoke as we drew near it. We were both busy looking about us, and I, for one, was busy also adjusting my mind to the new situation, both curious and comic, which dawning suspicions, derived from the observations I had already made about the place, told me we were going to meet in a few minutes. I don't know what Piers was thinking just then. From the intentness of his expression he might have been expecting Daphne Hazel to burst from the bushes at any moment with all the hounds of Elf−land in pursuit.

Then we came out, round a belt of beech trees, and stood before the terrace of the Hall. We stood there quite a long time. The first glance at the Hall was enough, but I continued looking at it because I dared not look at Piers. When at length I did, I had to sit down on the stump of a tree and let my sense of humour have its way. I've never seen such a picture of crestfallen bewilderment as he presented. But he saw the funny side of it himself after a while and sat down beside me and laughed.

It was Ringstones Hall, all right: I hadn't the slightest doubt about that. But the place hadn't been lived in for a generation. The chimney−pots were gone, many a slab had slid from the roof and the shutters hung rotting from their hinges in front of the windows; grass and weeds grew in the cracks of the steps and tall red docks lifted their heads as high as the ground−floor windowsills. The house was not quite a ruin, but it was in the last stage of dilapidation and decay; deserted, mournful, pitiful as only an abandoned house can look.

We went up the steps and across the terrace. The front door was half−open; it had sagged on its hinges and, by the accumulation of soil at its foot, many a long year had passed since it was last shut. We went inside, into a stone−flagged hall, and looked about us. Our entry disturbed a number of jackdaws in the upper storey and their loud alarm cries echoed hollowly through the house. We heard them fluttering and scrabbling about the roof and setting up an indignant clamour as they wheeled about the place outside. The entrance hall smelt of damp and mould. From the marks on the walls it looked as if they had once been panelled; now they were stripped and the bare stone was streaked by weather. Only the lowest stair remained. All the others, with supports and balusters too, had been ripped out, and the landing that hung inaccessible above was devoid of woodwork. We wandered into the other ground−floor rooms. All were alike, stripped and empty; doors, panelling, almost every scrap of woodwork gone; the plaster had fallen from the ceilings and the fireplaces were choked with twigs and rubbish.

It had been a good old house. We admired it even in its decay: a well−built place with room to move about With a little imaginative reconstruction you could see it as it might have been a century ago: a sober, dignified, solid place wearing an air of having been there a long, long time.

“Well, well, well,” said Piers slowly when we came out on to the terrace again. “Let's go and have a look at the stables.”

We went round the end of the house and pushed our way between two broad, high yew hedges which had once bounded a short drive but now nearly blocked it; then down a flagged path, all but grassed over, to a square of buildings in much the same state of neglect as the Hall. One side of the double carriage−gate was missing. We went through into the yard. Every flag of the pavement was outlined by a little hedge of grass and weeds and the stones themselves were green with moss. Piers walked over to a stone trough that stood in the middle of the yard. Beside it leaned an iron pump, red with rust. The spout of the pump was missing; the handle lay on the flags. It ended, I observed, in some sort of scroll ornament, half rusted away.

Most of the doorways round the yard gaped open. I wandered round and poked my head into a few of them. All were empty and smelt damply of long disuse. The roofs of some of the places had fallen in, but on the ridge of the block facing the gates there were still the remains of a wooden lantern with a bit of iron−work on the top of it which had once, perhaps, supported a weather vane. I paused in my tour of the yard at one corner to fill my pipe, looking idly into a bigger place with a double doorway which seemed to have been a coach−house. I stepped inside to strike a match, and, with half an eye, as I attended to the lighting of my tobacco, I noticed that the place still contained some mouldering vehicular rubbish leaning against the walls, while odds and ends of rotting leather harness and bits of old iron were strewn about the floor. There seemed to be some sort of wide old fireplace on one side. Piers, who had followed me and gone further into the place, poked about among the rubbish while the light of my match lasted.

“Two things at any rate,” I said, as we walked back to the Hall again, “emerge from this reconnaissance. One is that we shall have to be content with our sandwiches for lunch, and the other is that we shall have to look elsewhere for your friend. Do you want to explore this place any more, or shall we have a shot at getting to Blagill before the pub shuts?”

He shook his head. He seemed quite satisfied, and in fact wore an air now of having expected the place to be like that. “There isn't a pub at Blagill,” he said. “At least, there's none marked on the map.”

He pulled the map out and thought for a time. I was a little puzzled by his manner then, but supposed that he was working out a new theory to account for Daphne Hazel's story in the fight of our discovery. I myself couldn't see what problem he could possibly find now in Daphne's bit of fiction, but, of course, we looked at the thing from different points of view.

“The quickest way back to Staineshead,” he said, “would be to strike straight over this hill and drop down into the road on the other side. We could go to Blagill and trust to getting a bus, but I don't know how they run, and the main thing now is to find Daphne as soon as we can.”

“Dammit,” said I, “we're out for a walk. Not, mark you, that I don't think it would be quicker to stick to the footpath than to take one of your short cuts, but I'm not convinced of the urgency, anyway.”

We crossed the park, Piers pointing out with rather a defensive air, as we approached the stream on the other side, that you could, with a little imagination, discern a kind of circular drive or track round the level space. We crossed the beck on the rocks and pushed through the marshy thickets of birch and willow on the other side, then tackled the steep hill.

Once we had got through the close and cobwebby plantations of conifers we stopped, sweating freely, beside a trickle of clear water and ate our sandwiches. After that it was a toilsome way up the moor. The sheep paths were not much use to us as they all ran horizontally, so we lugged ourselves slowly upwards through the tangle of bracken and heath, and finally reached the saddle in the ridge which we had seen from the Stone Circle. I say ridge, but it is a broad, more or less level mountain top, and, of course, most of it is bog and moss. It was very slow progress we made, but we kept advancing in a general Easterly direction, bearing, if anything, away to our left. It took us nearly as long to get over that hill as it had done to come from Staineshead to Ringstones by the path. But, of course, we couldn't have dreamed of going back by the same way we had come.

When, in the end, we got down on the other side and squelched in our sodden boots upon the metalled road we made up for lost time, and did a steady march of four miles an hour all the way to Staineshead. The bus from Blagill overtook us just as we came to the first houses of Staineshead.

Piers's idea was to go to the Post Office and begin his enquiries after Miss Hazel there. I agreed, but persuaded him to call at the principal pub in the place, the White Bear, and see if we could do something about our night's lodging. To my surprise, but not at all to his, they made no difficulty about giving us a room at a moderate price. We asked the landlady if she knew anything of Miss Hazel, but drew blank; however, she directed us to the Post Office.

I was wondering whether I dare propose to Piers that the investigation be postponed until we had had some tea, when our quest ended before it had well begun. Staineshead is not a big place, but still, the encounter was a stroke of luck. Half−way down the main street Piers suddenly exclaimed, “Hallo!” and darted off to the other side of the road. There, looking into a general store window, was a tall, fair−haired girl in a belted green frock, bare−headed, bare−armed, with a little boy holding one of her hands and industriously kicking out the toe of his shoe against stones of the shop−front.

Piers and the girl had already greeted one another before I came across to them, and were launched on half−embarrassed, half−laughing explanations, which were interrupted and made still more confused by my introduction, and then broken off altogether by our being joined by a middle−aged woman who came out of the shop accompanied by two olive−skinned, foreign−looking little girls of twelve and fourteen or so. We stood in a knot on the pavement and everybody talked at once, including the little boy, whose theme was simply and insistently tea. However, it emerged that the middle−aged lady was Mrs. Hancock, that she was Daphne's temporary employer, that little Bobby was her son and the two girls children of a friend staying with the Hancocks for the school holidays.

While Piers did most of the talking on our side, I, naturally, observed Daphne Hazel, the quarry, so to speak, of our wild−goose chase. She was very much the pleasant, active−looking girl I had pictured; just the girl who would have enjoyed such energetic gambols as she had described. Still, what struck me, and what couldn't well have been described in her first−person story, was her good looks. I admired in particular a most attractive combination of natural tones: a shining softness of pale hair, an intense blue of the eyes and a clarity of complexion where the blood brightened the light−brown tan of summer. That she recognised the satisfying harmony of those colours herself was indicated, I thought, by her having refrained from intruding on them any smear of synthetic carmine.

Mrs. Hancock made the amiable suggestion that we should go back with them for tea, so off we went on foot The house, it appeared, was not far out of the town. Piers and Daphne and the little boy walked in front and Mrs. Hancock and the two little girls and I followed on their heels. I was giving Mrs. Hancock a rather cautious account of our walk.

“Oh, Ringstones Hall!” she said. “Daphne and my husband can tell you a story about Ringstones Hall!”

I hesitated to ask what, because I was not sure how much she knew about Daphne's story, but then, from what Daphne was saying to Piers, I grasped that there wasn't much secret about it.

Daphne's voice expressed great surprise. “But didn't you get my letter?”

“No,” said Piers. “There was no letter.”

“But I wrote,” she protested, “and explained it all. I sent the letter off first, because I remember thinking when I was wrapping up the book, how silly—because I could have put the letter inside the book and saved twopence ha'penny. But I'd written the letter first and I licked the envelope and put the stamp on and gave it to Bobby to post without thinking.''

She stopped suddenly and we all stopped. She looked at Bobby, a child, I suppose, of some nine or ten years, with consternation in her face.

“Bobby!” she cried. “You did post that letter I gave you on Monday, didn't you?”

The child, put on his guard and all his natural mistrust of adults roused by this concentration of attention, tried to divert it by skipping the direct question with a brief nod and immediately seeking to interest us in a project, of which he seemed to have information, to make the green Sheepcar buses extend their service to Staineshead. I sympathised with this gallant but hopeless attempt to create a diversion. A few more years would teach him that there's nothing so pertinacious as a woman intent on fixing responsibility for a lapse. Reluctantly, therefore, he abandoned the bus subject and admitted that he had posted the letter.

“Yes, but when?” Daphne persisted. “Yesterday,” came the sorry confession.

Daphne gasped, “Oh, Bobby!” and looked up at us, blushing with comical guilt.

“I forgot it on Monday, but I remembered it yesterday morning and I did post it all right,” Bobby volunteered, finding explanation easier after an admission of the fact.

I don't think Piers wanted to catch my eye just then. The thought of the postman delivering the simple solution of all the mystery Piers had elaborated, probably at the very moment when he stood staring with a wild surmise at the mournful solitude of Ringstones Hall, was too much for me. My laughter puzzled Mrs. Hancock and it made Daphne's warm cheek glow the brighter.

“So that's why you came!” she said, as the full enormity of the misunderstanding sank in. “And you've been all that way to Ringstones! Oh dear, what an ass I was. But I can explain it all....”

“I was just going to suggest that you might explain it over tea,” said Mrs. Hancock, pleasantly. “Shall we go along?”

(3)

Mrs. Hancock's husband, she told me before we reached the house, was a doctor with his practice in Staineshead. The two young girls were the daughters of an Egyptian doctor, a friend of Dr. Hancock, who, it seems, had spent most of the war in Egypt. They were at school in England and had been spending the summer holiday with the Hancocks. Mrs. Hancock had thought it a good idea to get someone to come for the summer who could both help to look after the children and give them some tuition in English. It so happened that Dr Hancock had an old friend who was a lecturer at Towerton College and he had written to her on the chance that the job might interest one of the Towerton girls.

The Egyptian girls, Farida and Na'ima, were shy. They spoke English quite well, but only giggled when I spoke to them in Arabic. That, perhaps, is scarcely to be wondered at. I know only classical Arabic, which, I've no doubt, I speak with a Cambridge accent, and I have very little idea what barbarous corruptions may pass for Arabic in the mouths of present−day Egyptians. But here, at any rate, I thought, was another of Daphne's sources; and Na'ima's name solved the puzzle of the “'ain”.

The Hancocks' house was a big one, with a spacious garden and a fine view of the moorland hills. Dr Hancock, who was waiting for us to begin tea, was a brisk, smart, jovial grey−haired little man, who could well have been the original of Daphne's Dr Ravelin. I was interested in his books, which filled many shelves round the big sitting−room where we had tea. He was not long in enquiring what we were reading at Cambridge, and soon he and I were well away on the subject of oriental languages. He seemed to have a fair command of colloquial Egyptian and some acquaintance with the written language. The little girls understood his Arabic all right and talked it back at him, and I'm afraid that in the interest of tracking down the classical origins of their dialect forms I rather forgot about Daphne's story. Incidentally, though, I had noticed that the doctor's library covered a pretty wide range, and among all sorts of scientific books there were a good few on anthropology and archaeology, including an abridged edition of The Golden Bough and several of Elliot Smith's and Perry's works.

Daphne did not begin to explain her story until the children had slipped away to play, and then she seemed to have such difficulty in beginning that Dr Hancock took the task on for her. He had laughed delightedly when he heard that we had actually gone to Ringstones Hall expecting to find her there.

“I know Ringstones well enough,” he said. “I was born and brought up in this district. It was a fine old place once upon a time. My father was in practice in Neatsbridge when he was a young man and he used to go and visit at Ringstones. I've heard him tell how he used to drive up to Blagill and over the moor in his dog−cart to dine with old Dr Ravelin—he was a doctor of Divinity, not Medicine—and back again in the pitch−dark night, with a skin full of port−wine and a head full of tales about pixies and hobgoblins and ancient Britons and Romans and Picts and I don't know what. Old Ravelin was an antiquarian and a folklorist, and he and my father used to go at it hammer and tongs about the local legends which my father, being brought up on scientific principles, would try to find natural origins for, while old Ravelin, it seems, was all for the supernatural.

“That was before I was born. Even in those days a place like Ringstones cost a lot to maintain, and I suppose old Ravelin found it too much for his means. At any rate he shut the place up and went abroad and died abroad. It passed to his heir, a grand−nephew, I believe, who was in the Indian Army. Captain Wrightson, he was called. There was a family of Wrightsons at Neatsbridge. I used to stare at their memorial tablets in the Parish Church on Sundays when I was a boy. But they've all died out long since. This Captain Wrightson was not known here. Whether he ever came and looked at the old place I don't quite know. It's likely enough that he had the idea of settling at Ringstones when he retired from the Army, but that never came about. The house was left with a couple of caretakers in it, a man and his wife that Wrightson sent up from London, and George Iddenden's father at Blagill rented the park for grazing. Then Captain Wrightson was killed: broke his neck in a riding accident. I remember hearing of that. I suppose I should be nineteen or twenty at the time. It was not long before my father died. Captain Wrightson had no children. I suppose his executors must have tried to sell the place as it stood, but no one would buy so remote an old place as that. It's too isolated and inconvenient for anyone nowadays. I say nowadays, but it's thirty years since. Still, even then people wanted something a bit more modern than Ringstones! Bit by bit they sold what was saleable: the furniture and all the old panelling and woodwork, and in the end the Iddendens bought the place for the grazing land, and some shooting syndicate which has since gone bust bought the moor. Some of the stuff was bought up locally. That Koweit chest in the hall came from there, and we have a few other bits of things.

“Well, that was the state of the place when I began to practise here in Staineshead twenty years ago. There used to be quite a good footpath over the moor from here to Blagill, and sometimes I used to go for a walk that way and have a look at Ringstones.”

Daphne now chimed in:

“I'd heard all about Ringstones, you see, from Dr Hancock. It sounded an interesting place and I thought I should like to see it....”

“So we went,” said Dr Hancock. He looked at Piers and me with an enquiring lift of his brows. “I suppose that's the adventure she told you about?”

Daphne looked at us all uncomfortably. “Well, no,” she began, but Piers helped her out by asking the doctor to give us his version of their trip to Ringstones first. The doctor looked rather surprised, but then, quickly grasping that this was more complicated than he had thought, gave us a short and precise account of their walk.

“When was it?” he said. “About four weeks ago? Yes. My wife was taking the children off to her sister's in Sheepcar for the day. It was a Sunday. Daphne and I decided we would walk over the moor, have a look at Ringstones, and come back by the evening bus from Blagill. I hadn't been over for years before then, and I found that the path had got so overgrown that it was a hard job to follow it. In fact, though I couldn't very well admit it at the time, I got well and truly lost. On my native heath! However, I knew that if we only kept on long enough I should see something that I knew, and Daphne's a bonny walker, so, after some hard going over the heather and mosses, we did in the end sight the Standing Stones—the Ringstones, you know, that the place is called after. That was fine. No danger of going wrong from there; but, just as we were getting to them, Daphne put her foot in a hole and came an awful cropper. When I picked her up I found she'd sprained an ankle and cut her left wrist quite deeply by coming down with her hand among the stiff heather stalks. It was rather a fix. The day had turned very dull. I thought we were likely to have a thunderstorm. There's no shelter at all up there. Well, of course, you know that. There was no question of her being able to walk to Blagill with that ankle, and though, of course, I gallantly offered to carry her the remaining four miles, she made such objections to that that I didn't.”

“Yes, I could see you carrying my nine stone all that way!” cried Daphne.

“Pooh!” said the little doctor. “I'd have tossed you over my shoulder like a roll of bedding. It was your dignity I was thinking about. Well, the only thing was to get Daphne down to the Hall, where she'd be sheltered a bit if it did rain, while I went off to Blagill to find some transport. I'm afraid we didn't improve the ankle getting down the hill, and it caused Daphne great pain. However, we got there. The door was open, I settled Daphne down on the bottom stair inside the front hall, got some water and bathed and bandaged her ankle and wrist with our handkerchiefs and then set off for Blagill as hard as I could go.”

“Just fancy!” Mrs. Hancock appealed to us. “Leaving the poor girl all alone there in that lonely old place, miles from anywhere. And after all the tales you'd been telling her about the Polish girl, too.”

“What had that to do with it?” demanded the doctor.

“Something, I think,” said Piers, looking at Daphne, who, with brilliant eyes, was making the best of her embarrassment. “I should like to hear about her.”

“All right,” said Doctor Hancock. “As near as I can, I'll tell you. It happened while I was away in the Army...”

Mrs. Hancock interposed. “I can tell that story better than you. I was here at the time. Some people called Roebuck who live at Towngate End took on a Polish maid in the last year of the war. It's my belief that the girl wasn't all there. She used to drive poor Mrs. Roebuck to distraction; she never understood a word the girl said and the girl, I expect, never understood anything they said to her. She was a fine−looking girl as far as figure went, but I always thought there was something wandering in her eyes. Well, one afternoon she went out for a walk and didn't come back. She hadn't turned up by the time it was dark, and Mrs. Roebuck rang me up and asked me what she ought to do. She was imagining all sorts of things, except the obvious one which, to my mind, was that Katia—that was the girl's name—had hopped off to Nettleworth, where the Polish troops were then. Well, she kept ringing me up at intervals until midnight, getting more and more worried: she'd telephoned the Polish camp, and Katia wasn't there, she'd telephoned the hospital and she'd telephoned the police, and she couldn't hear a word of the lass. Finally, I persuaded her to leave it to the police sergeant here and go to bed.

“However, before eight o'clock the next morning she rings me up in great agitation and says she's had a phone call from the Iddendens at Blagill and they've found Katia. Would I take her over in the car to collect her. I was doing W.V.S. work then. So off we went, Mrs. Roebuck and I, to Blagill. There was Katia in the Iddendens' kitchen, looking as wild as a witch; old George grinning all over his face, young Joe looking very sheepish and young Joe's missus not looking at all pleased. Katia was wearing some of Mrs. Iddenden's things, and when we asked where her own were there was a certain amount of embarrassment. But young Joe told me the whole tale next time he came into Staineshead. It appears he'd gone up on his pony early that morning to look after some bullocks they had in Ringstones Park. On his way back he saw something white lying between those standing stones. Thinking it was a sheep that was sick, he rode over and then saw that it was a girl, stark naked, and, he said he thought at first, dead. But just as he came up, she sat up, gave one shriek and flew at him and clung to him for dear life. Poor Joe, he said all he could think of for a bit was that it was a good job there was nobody else about. However, he disentangled himself and gave her his coat and tried to tell her to stay there while he went and got his wife to bring her something to put on. But Katia wasn't having that He said she was terrified and he could make nothing of her, so, little as he liked the job, he put her on the pony and led her down to the farm and handed her over to his wife. He hadn't any idea who she was, but his wife, it seems, had heard that the Roebucks had a Polish maid, and as this seemed to be a foreigner she rang Mrs. Roebuck up.

“Well, of course, we tried to get out of Katia what had happened, but she'd lost whatever wits she ever had by then. She never had much English, and the most I could understand from her was that she'd met some people she called 'little men' and they'd played tricks on her and taken her clothes and kept her all night at the old Hall. She had obviously had a bad fright of some sort, but she didn't seem to have come to much bodily harm, except for a lot of bruises which, I suppose, she'd got through tumbling about the hillside in her birthday suit.

“The fact that she had been down to the Hall was proved when Joe Iddenden a day or two later turned up with her clothes. He'd found them somewhere among the old buildings belonging to the Hall. Katia, of course, was quite barmy. The Roebucks couldn't keep her and so they asked the Poles to collect her. But, bless my soul! they'd scarcely arranged with the Polish doctor at the camp to come and fetch her when off she flitted again. And this time they never did find her, though they got the police and the Home Guard and the Polish troops and the boy−scouts and everybody in three parishes scouring the moors for days. If she ever was found it wasn't in this neighbourhood, and nobody here has heard tell of her from that day to this.”

“And, you know,” broke in the doctor, hardly waiting for his wife to finish, “you wouldn't believe it in these days of popular science and the pictures, but somebody dropped a dark hint about the Duergar, and somebody else said, well, the Stone Circle always had been reckoned an uncanny place...”

“The Duergar?” we asked.

“Yes. I shouldn't have thought there was anybody left in Northumberland who knew the name outside a book. But it's odd how these things do linger underneath. The Duergar's supposed to be the wild man of the moors who hunts people down and carries them off underground. I haven't heard his name mentioned since I was so high and my grandmother used to tell me fairy−tales.”

“Oh, that!” said Mrs. Hancock. “That's all a lot of silly nonsense. Somebody just said that for a joke. What I was meaning was that I shouldn't have been able to help thinking of that loony flitting about the place.”

Piers wrinkled his brows. “And you'd heard about this before you went to Ringstones?” he asked Daphne. “Yes,” she said, “but I wasn't thinking about it particularly. I didn't much mind being left alone in the old

Hall. It was broad daylight, after all. And my ankle was hurting far too much for me to worry about anything

else.”

“Yes, now, but let me finish the facts,” said Dr Hancock. “I got down to Blagill, and by good luck I caught Joe Iddenden just as he was going out. I got him to yoke out the pony trap and come back with me at once. I suppose all told I was away from Daphne about two and a half hours. When Joe and I got back she was lying on the floor in a dead faint. I brought her round and we got her into the trap; but she was in a very distressed condition and I was puzzled, because the effect didn't seem altogether due to shock from the sprain, and there hadn't been all that loss of blood from the laceration of her wrist. Joe was very good. After I had given Daphne some treatment at his place he drove us all the way back here. I never thought about his adventure with the Polish girl then, but I'll bet he did! Daphne was a good deal better when we got home. We put her to bed, and apart from the sprain and a rather low temperature and slow pulse her condition was normal. By next morning she was quite well in herself. There now, those are the facts.”

“I see,” said Piers. “But you've missed out one, haven't you?” “What?” asked Daphne, quickly.

“You had lost your watch, hadn't you?”

“Yes,” she said. “That's perfectly true. The strap had broken. I put it in my coat pocket. They're shallow little pockets, and somewhere it must have fallen out. Perhaps when I fell down. I didn't miss it until Dr Hancock had left me, though.”

“Well,” I said, “but what did happen?”

I'm afraid this inquest was rather hard on Daphne. She looked very uncomfortable, and though she was obviously trying not to be self−conscious about it, I'm sure she was heartily wishing she had never obeyed the impulse to send that wretched exercise book to Piers.

“I don't really know how to explain this,” she said, as much to Dr. and Mrs. Hancock as to Piers and me. “You know I amused myself while I had to stay indoors with this sprain by scribbling in an exercise book? I didn't show you what I'd written, because, well, it seemed such nonsense when it was written down. I just couldn't believe it myself, and yet I felt I simply had to write it all down. I suppose, having written it, I ought to have kept it to myself, but something—I really don't know what... I mean, like you do with a dream, I wanted to tell it; and Piers knows me, and so, on the spur of the moment I wrote a letter saying how I had come to write it, then parcelled the thing up and sent it off. I never dreamed, of course, that Bobby hadn't posted the letter. You must have wondered what on earth it was when you got the book without any explanation. But, I mean, how could I have imagined you'd go off to Ringstones to look for me?”

“Never mind,” I said comfortingly. “We enjoyed it. I wouldn't have missed that bog−hole for worlds.”

“If there is a bog−hole anywhere within reach you never do miss it,” retorted Piers. “But still, what I should like to know is where you think the story came from. I mean, how did it happen in your mind? I must send it back so that you can read it,” he said to the Hancocks, “if Daphne doesn't mind.”

Daphne hesitated. “Well,” she said frowning a little and scraping the crumbs on the cloth together with her finger, “well, it was a sort of dream, or a lot of dreams. I know that sounds impossible: I mean, one couldn't normally dream all that—all those conversations and so on. It's frightfully difficult to express this, but you yourself must have had a dream something like that at some time. I mean, one where you wake up and although you can only remember clearly one or two incidents, or one or two sentences that someone has said in your dream, yet you have the strongest feeling that there was a tremendous amount more that you just fail to remember, something that's there, and yet just eludes your grasp.”

“The tail of the mouse disappearing down the hole,” I said. “Yes, I've sometimes had that feeling after a dream.”

“Well,” she said, “this was like that, but somehow a much stronger feeling and such a vivid sense of reality that really, while I was writing it down, I did seem to be recollecting actual facts. As soon as I put pen to paper the whole thing came pouring back: I knew that all that talk of Dr Ravelin's that I'd dreamed must have been like that, and I knew I must have seen the park just like that, and that the girls and Nuaman must have done what they did do. I mean, I don't say that I remembered all that talk word for word, but I woke up with sentences perfectly clear in my mind and I knew that if so−and−so had been said then all the other must have led up to it.”

I thought I understood what she was trying to say, and Piers supported her by telling us that once before his Tripos he had woken up in the morning convinced that he had composed a complete series of answers to a paper on Seventeenth Century Drama in his sleep.

The doctor was interested. “When did the dreams begin?” he asked Daphne.

“That's one of the funny things about it,” she said. “I can't quite decide. I know that for a time after you left me in the hall there at Ringstones I didn't think about anything very much except the pain in my ankle and my wrist and how I was to get back; though, at the same time, I was worrying about my watch. It's only a cheap one, but I wish I hadn't lost it. Then I remember feeling cold, which was odd, because the day was close and sultry. I think I did get a bit frightened then. I began to feel that the place was awfully still and lonely, though there were faint little noises rustling about in some of the rooms, and quite suddenly, I remember, I heard some people, children they sounded like, laughing and calling to each other outside. I was absolutely convinced I heard them. I just couldn't catch the words, but they were voices. I wasn't frightened, simply because they were so real. I was thinking more of the shock they were going to get if they came inside and saw me sitting there at the foot of the stairs.”

“The jackdaws,” I suggested. “They can sound very human. They and the noise of the beck. I've once or twice been as convinced myself when we've been camping near a hill stream that someone was talking close by and had to get up to assure myself it was only the water.”

“Yes,” said Daphne doubtfully. “Yes, I suppose that must have been it. But then someone came down the stairs behind me and touched me at the back of the neck and then I fainted.”

“What!” we all shouted together. “Down the stairs? There aren't any stairs!”

Daphne looked really startled. “Aren't there?” she asked incredulously. “But I sat on them. That's where you made me sit down while you bandaged my ankle, isn't it?” She turned to Dr Hancock.

The doctor looked at her very keenly. “You sat on the bottom step,” he said. “But that's all there was to sit on. The rest of the stairs were taken out long ago. Didn't you notice when we went in? Well, no, perhaps you wouldn't. I suppose that ankle was giving you enough pain to distract your mind from your surroundings at that moment. That's rather an interesting example of the power of suggestion. You were sitting on a stair with your back to where the rest of the stairs ought to be, and even though you can perhaps feel that there's nothing behind you, yet your subconscious mind makes the assumption that the rest of the stairs are there. But I should say that in recalling what happened you have involuntarily transposed two events: you fainted first—the fatigue and shock could account for that—and after a partial recovery of consciousness there was this hallucination of hearing footsteps and being touched. There may even have been a slight delirium, though, at the time, the injury didn't seem to me sufficient. But you never know. I once saw a hefty Egyptian fellah pass clean out from a subcutaneous injection.”

“You know,” Daphne resumed, “I really did think that there were stairs there. I can't quite picture that hall without them. I can see now, I think, that all my dreams about the place were pieced together from what you'd told me before, not from what I actually saw there. I don't think I was quite conscious any of the time from that faint I did until waking up the next morning in bed here. At any rate, I have no clear idea at all of being put into the trap and brought back. Perhaps—I don't know—some disjointed land of impression of turning wheels and a whip cracking. But the next morning, although I woke up feeling all right except that my ankle hurt, I was absolutely certain that I had spent the whole time from that faint in one tremendous crowded dream and that, if I tried, I could recollect the whole of it in perfect detail, and, well, that conviction was so strong that I hobbled over to my chest of drawers and got out that new exercise book and my fountain pen and began to scribble it all down.”

She sat back and looked round at us.

“I should like to see this production,” said the doctor. “It's quite a feat to write down a dream, but it isn't by any means impossible. After all, reason and imagination step in to fill in the gaps between the genuinely recollected incidents of the dream. The neo−rosicrucians make a practice of it. I've seen some of their records of dreams. Astonishing farragos.”

I nodded. I bad seen some too. It seems to me,” I said, feeling rather pleased that my simple explanation of the story as an exercise in fiction had after all been a bit nearer the mark than Piers's mystery−mongering; “it seems to me that you had all the elements of the story, or dream, that you wrote already supplied to you here, from Dr Hancock's stories of Dr Ravelin's talks with his father, from the presence of these two little Egyptian girls and the little boy. Most of the matter of Dr Ravelin's archaeological ramblings might be dream reproductions of bits you had read in some of these books here, if you've dipped into them.” (Daphne admitted she had.) “If pain can start you dreaming, and I suppose it might, perhaps underlying feelings of anxiety—I mean about your watch and getting home—might be expressed in a land of crazy story in which physical exertion and being held a prisoner were the main themes...”

Both Piers and the doctor opened their mouths and prepared to tear my theory of dreams to tatters, but I fended them off until I had got out something else that interested me in the story as a story.

“Half a tick before you Freudians charge,” I said. “Just let me say that I think I can understand your dreaming all that—even the dream within the dream. I have a dim memory of double dreams myself. But there's one of your fancies I should like to know the origin of. This sort of gladiators' school: not that the general idea of that is strange. God knows, I still occasionally dream about the agonies of being chased round the gym at my own school. But I mean the chariots. I can see that it might be an expression of that feeling you sometimes have in a dream of being fastened to something you have to haul along—something that holds you back when you want to speed away; but I should like to know where you got the actual picture of girls drawing chariots. There's something I seem to remember in an Elizabethan play about pampered jades of Asia, and there's that prince of Thai Gin in Marco Polo who had his slave−girls draw him about his palace grounds in a little light vehicle made for the purpose; there is even a doubtfully authenticated story of the Indian Mutiny which relates that a son of the Moghul Emperor, when the mutineers took Delhi, had some of the English women captives stripped and harnessed to his carriage; but I wonder what you had been reading?” Daphne grinned. “Well, I never heard that about the Indian Mutiny, and I'm ashamed to say I've never read Marco Polo. I do know the bit from 'Tamburlane,' but really, I can't think where I've read about those chariots.

They were just there: quite a usual feature of the games. It was just that I felt that if once they got me strapped up to that pole...”

She rounded her shoulders and seemed to shrink from a present physical threat.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose it just remains an unexplained quirk of the dreaming fancy, then. But still, the inspiration, so to speak, seems to me a bit inadequate. I saw that coachhouse place you mentioned, and I'm dashed if my subconscious, or imagination, or what−not, would ever have fabricated a gleaming chariot out of a few old bike wheels and bits of mouldy trap−harness.”

Daphne began to object to something, but Piers interrupted her. “That reminds me!” he exclaimed. He fished something out of his jacket pocket and laid it on the table.

“That your watch?” he asked.

Daphne picked it up. “Yes. Yes. It is. But where did you find it?” I noticed again how extraordinarily brilliant her eyes became when she was excited; their blue light held my attention so as she stared at Piers that perhaps I was slow to understand why the warm colour of her brow and cheeks which had been so attractive a setting for the eyes' brilliance had now turned dull and cold.

The little doctor took the watch from her, wound it up, shook it and held it to his ear. He gave an exclamation of pleased surprise: “Well! That's none the worse, anyway. It's going!” He began to set it by the clock on the mantelpiece.

Daphne's eyes were still fixed on Piers. “Where did you find it?” she asked again, but her voice was almost a whisper.

“Why, in that coach−house in the stable−yard,” said Piers, looking at her intently.

Dr Hancock jerked his head up. “Stable−yard!” he exclaimed. “You couldn't. Daphne never went near the stables. She couldn't have done. Could you?”

Daphne did not speak. I suddenly realised the cause of that peculiar brightness in her eyes, and I was shocked to see how far behind Piers I had been in understanding the depth of her distress. She held out both her hands, not to take the watch, but with a curious gesture of surrender as if offering the hands and wrists themselves to someone. I saw a newly−healed long cut on the inside of her left wrist plain against the sun−browned skin. She seemed to offer her wrists a moment and then, yielding to an unknown compulsion, reluctantly turned down her palms, curling her fingers round something invisible to us. No one spoke; I think we were all looking with a slowly rising fear at those two drooping hands, so helplessly waiting there. Then Piers bent swiftly across the table and seized both her hands in his, gripping them hard.

“Hold on,” he said. “The watch ticks our time. The doctor did arrive in time, you know. He did arrive.”