The Sword and the Net

9 LOS ROBLES: First Phase

There was slimy, spinning darkness. Sometimes it was the inmost self which whirled and the darkness which was stationary; sometimes this law, in each case seemingly immutable, was violently reversed.

The self became aware of its body—and he was afraid with a fear which was so terrible as to be exalting. And he began to doubt the darkness: perhaps there was no darkness: perhaps he only thought there was darkness.

The darkness ceased whirling but he remained still. The stillness was more frightful than the movement had been.

He was Otto Falken and there was a dull ache in his head and agony in his legs. He was Nils Jorgensen—and both his legs were broken. He had been shot down? He had been wounded? He had been injured by a bomb fragment? No—he was Jorgensen. He was in America. But his legs were broken—he knew that. Both his legs. There had been an explosion. . . .

He knew everything—suddenly, in a flash of memory and comprehension which left his body shaking.

There was softness beneath and around him. The softness of a bed. There was a heavy constraint about his head which was nothing to do with the pain inside it, and his legs were each of them bound and stiffly constricted and immovable in spite of efforts which shot him through with darts of anguish.

He was in a bed and there were bandages around his skull and splints upon his legs—and he could not see. A cold sweat of fear broke out all over him. He could not see.

He lay very still and thought about his eyes—and found that the muscles in lids and cheeks were stiffly contracted, screwing the eyes tightly shut like those of a child who has been frightened by a vivid light.

Perhaps he could see. Perhaps he was neither blind nor in darkness. Perhaps he had just clamped his eyes shut like this and failed to order them to open.

He ordered them to open—and nothing happened. He was conscious of the rigidity, as if they were frozen, of the little muscles beneath the skin.

He tried again, and the lids lifted heavily. There was light and he could see it. It was a soft, shaded light and it came from somewhere beyond his range of vision and it did not hurt his eyes.

He could see. Beyond doubt he could see. He saw, directly above him as he lay, a white ceiling divided by thick yet graceful beams of some dark and glowing wood. He saw, below these and at the end of his vision-range, the upper part of a wide, white-framed window, outlining a rectangle of that grey-shot blackness which is forerunner of dawn. He could see.

A little groan of relief came from his lips. He tried to turn upon his side to see yet more—and the moan became a groan, almost a cry, at the pain which the fruitless effort had caused. He lay limply as he was. His lungs laboured as if he had been running and again he felt the sweat cold upon his forehead.

He heard a whisper of movement, and into his vision, at the left side of him as he lay, came a figure. But it was out of his sight immediately, and all he knew was that it was a woman’s.

She stood at the extreme head of the bed, and there was a little rattling of glass or china. He tried to move so that he could see her, but failed by reason of new and breath-taking hurts.

She moved again. She bent over him—and he could see her face.

The most extraordinary thing happened to him then, inside his mind. He knew that he did not know this girl; had never so much as been aware of her existence, whosoever and whatsoever she might be. But he knew, too, as he looked into the dark softness of the wide-set eyes, that here was no stranger. In a blinding flash of that clear and instinctive sanity which may so often and so easily be mistaken for its very antithesis, he knew that his essential and basic self had recognized another.

His eyes widened and he was for a moment oblivious to the pain which had increasingly been flaming through him. For a checked instant of time, the dark eyes widened too and in them he thought he saw reflection of that same momentarily paralysing shock of surprise.

And then she spoke, in a clear, cool young voice which was curiously deep yet had in it no hint of masculinity. She moved a little as she spoke, and the strange, binding spell between their eyes was broken and he saw her for the first time.

She was young, younger than her voice and her eyes: if she had reached her twenties, the accession was recent. She was, perhaps, a little under the middle height of American women but she was lithe and free-moving and slim without angularity. Her hair was smooth and shining. It was unshorn, and it coiled about her proud neat head in a dark soft rope which was like a halo framing from above the oval of her face; an oval whose purity of outline somehow welded into a fascinating and compelling unity features which did not intrinsically fit with one another—the wide-set eyes dark and luminous beneath their fine uptilted brows, the charming and memorable and indefinable nose, the strong yet gentle sweep of the jaw, the high cheekbones with the faint suggestion of gauntness in the shadows beneath them, the wide and generous and vivid mouth, upturning at the corners and with a lower lip of delectable fullness.

She said: “Be quiet now. You’re all right. But you have to sleep. The doctor left something to make you sleep.”

She bent over him and gently lifted his left arm from the sheets and began to push back the sleeve of the silk pyjama coat whose softness he had felt unknowingly.

He tried to see her eyes again, but all that met his gaze was the nape of her neck, soft and smooth and golden-tanned beneath the smooth coilings of the gleaming dark hair. He tried to speak, but his lips felt stiff and unwieldy and his tongue seemed awkwardly heavy. He tried again and managed a few creaking words.

“Where . . . is . . . this?” he mumbled.

She said: “You mustn’t talk yet. It’s all right.”

He felt something wet and cold upon the outside of his upper arm and then firm strong fingers which pinched around the cold place and then a stinging little jab.

“There,” said the deep young voice. “You’ll go to sleep now.”

He was in a deep warm pit. It was soft and cloudily comfortable and the only sign of pain in him was memory which made present peace all the more delicious.

He bathed, he wallowed, in the heavenly nothingness.

And then after hours or æons the voices began. They were very quiet at first, little formless rustlings which should have enhanced the delight of this endless irresponsible drowsing like rain upon the roof. Should have but did not—for it became imperative to his mind that he should catch their words, and peace began to slip from him, layer by lovely layer.

The voices grew louder, one at a time, against the for ever rustling background of the others. They rocketed up out of the rustling and hurled their words at his cringing ears and subsided into the obbligato again and were replaced by others. He could not escape them—and the peace was transmuted into a strange hell where he cowered from words as if they were jagged missiles which would bruise and tear his head to pulp.

“This is not work which will bring you public honour!” they screamed at him. “Sale boche!” they screamed—and followed the words with a harsh sound of spitting. “Could you lend me a pencil—it is seventy-one minutes past the hour. . . . I’m all right, Bob: are you all right, darling?” They were endless and relentless. They screamed at him.

“Yer in the fifth bloody column!” they screamed. “I say, could you help me clear this stuff away—my mother’s in there! . . . A bleedin’ German masqueroodin’ as a Swede! . . . Come on, Mother—where’s your life-belt? . . . The good old U.S., son—Noo York! . . . Come and help me, Bob: are you all right, darling?”

They screamed at him and he could not shut his ears to them nor his memory. He knew each voice, and with the knowledge went exact and vivid memory of its owner.

“Goering and Churchill and Someone and Mussolini and Henry Armstrong!” they screamed. “Nils, you were wonderful—smile at them! . . . And there it was, chaps, a German sub! . . . Much and high appreciation of this wonderful country: it is truly a free land! . . . An Evil Idea cannot beat a Good Idea! . . . I’m all right, Bob: are you all right, darling?”

They screamed at him—and they came faster and faster up out of the rustling depths until there was no pause between them; no surcease. They screamed:

“Turn around so that I can see your profile quick those big doors in the side I’m all right Bob the thirtieth of February is the day are you all right darling you do not know the German language not one single word the F.B.I.’ll be around like ants come and help me Bob where’s her life-belt there’ll be nothing left of Tipping or Coley or anything all officers in the Mess-Hall in five minutes Derek go up on deck at once they are not bad you know not the young men you will help to teach them come and help me Bob my mother’s in there are you all right darling my mother’s in there chaps are you all right darling my mother’s in there Bob come and help me my mother’s in there my mother’s in there my mother’s in there are you all right my mother’s in there. . . .”

The mounting torture spurred him to impossible action. With a wild wrenching of every force in mind and body and self he tore free of them. There was fire and the whirling again and he burst through the veil which had held him away from reality and heard a hoarse wordless cry from his own lips.

The room, except for the corner in which his bed stood, was flooded with sunshine. There were trees outside the wide white window and in them the birds cheeped and twittered. There was a light slight ghost of a breeze and it came cool into the room with the warm yellow sunshine and made the leaves on the trees dance and gently sway.

He lay absolutely still. His body was wet and shaking and it was difficult to breathe. But he felt relief like a god-sent salve: it flowed over and in and through him and the grinding pain in legs and head and body was constant and welcome proof of reality.

Through the open window came the warm and thudding and satisfactory sound of a horse’s hoofs on turf. Somewhere in the sunlit, invisible distance was a throaty rattling of frogs and the somnolent whirring of a mower. From below this room where he lay came a burst of rich, chuckling laughter and then a throaty, soft-lined voice which shouted words he could not hear but which he knew by the rich and indescribable tonal quality to belong to a coloured woman.

He turned his head with slow and deliberate disregard of the hurt the movement caused him. He looked out at the room for the first time. It was a large room, irregularly shaped—and it was like nothing he had expected nor anything he had ever seen. It had a rich, cool depth of space and comfort and permanence. It was serene and ageless and graceful, and the furnishings seemed, like the place itself, to belong to no order or plan except their admirable own.

His head hurt and he slowly laid it back upon the soft pillow which smelt evanescently of fresh lavender. He gazed out of the facing window at the sun-dappled, swaying leaves. He heard, from the farther side of the house, the sound of a car as it came to a halt upon a gravel surface and then a man’s voice and, answering, the clear, deep young voice which had told him, “You’ll go to sleep now”; the clear, deep young voice of the girl about whom he had been afraid to think in case she were an unreality.

He lay and waited. His body was trembling but he heeded neither this nor its pain. He heard feet upon a stairway—and then the slight clicking sound of a doorhandle gently turned and a little, extra stirring of the air in the room, and then, hushed almost to a whisper, her voice.

“I think he’s still asleep, doctor,” it said.

Otto moistened his lips with his tongue. He was going to speak—and then he would see her again and know whether it had been true, the tremendous, the vital importance of that recognition between them. He was afraid to find out—but he must. He said:

“Please, I am awake,” and waited without breathing while the light feet and the heavy approached the bed and then came into his sight.

He saw a man first—and his eyes went past the man and saw her—and he knew that it had been true. The dark eyes flickered over his, barely grazing his steady gaze—but it was enough. He found that his whole body had been taut, but now he relaxed it. He was breathing fast.

The doctor pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed and peered down at his patient. He said:

“Well, well. Feeling a little more like yourself, I see.” He put out a hand and felt for the pulse in Otto’s wrist. “You’re a very lucky young man—very lucky!”

And, after that first waking, after the realization that she was there and was real, time ceased to have its ordinary applications for him. It was not that he was unconscious for long periods, or delirious or drugged or out of his senses, although he may have been, for brief intervals, each and all of these. It was rather that, for him in his illness, time functioned upon a different basis from the normal: the earth went around the sun in vague rotation—but beyond that point ceased all similarity to time as he had known it. He was here, and his body was broken and sick: he was here, and while his body was mending, the dividing-lines of man-made time, those barrier-lines which mark off minutes and hours and days and weeks, all faded into nothingness: instead of a rigidly charted, ever-adding sequence of periods was just a round map of being. Things happened upon this map, haphazard and almost incessantly, but they marked no progression in any mathematical dimension; they were unco-ordinate fillings-in of the blankness of the map; fillings-in which would eventually complete the map and make him whole.

So he lay—and things happened and the fillings-in mounted and added and brought him ever nearer to recovery. But because the pressure of the time-chart had been removed from him, the happenings which made the fillings-in were each an individual problem or excitement or pleasure or suffering: they made no chain; they were unconnected units of Event, objective in the main but sometimes of his own engineering.

As, for instance, the question of drugs. They wished to give him drugs: they said that drugs would help his recovery by making sleep easier for him. They said this and much more—but he would not take the drugs, after they had once or twice been given to him, because he was afraid.

The fear was two-headed: he was afraid, equally, that with no command over himself he might in some way betray Nils Jorgensen and the Machine, and he was afraid, with a sick and different fear, of the pictures he might see. The pictures, as he found when they gave him morphia again that first time the doctor came, were worse even than the voices.

To win his fight for no drugs he had to have help, her help. He achieved it simply, by asking her for it. She was sitting in a deep chair by the window which faced the foot of his bed: she was reading, and the light of a shaded lamp cast its soft gold circle downwards and touched bright gleamings from the coiled smooth darkness of her hair.

He spoke—and she set down the book and rose and was beside him in a swift, graceful instant.

And he told her. He said:

“They must not give me drugs. The sleep is not good then.” His voice was laboured and the words were slow and heavy with the care of their selection. He said:

“Sleep with the drugs is bad. In my case. I am more tired after the sleep than before.”

He kept his eyes upon her face, but her eyes were guarded. She did not cast them down nor veil them studiedly—but they seemed, without any sign of deliberate avoidance, never to meet his for more than an instant far too short for any revelation. She said:

“I’ll tell the doctor,” and bent over him and touched his forehead lightly with fingers which were cool and impersonal. His skin was clammily wet with the sweat of horror and he wished that she had not touched it then. She brought him water to drink and straightened the twisted dressings upon his head and gave him a fresh pillow. She said no more than the four words—but there were no more drugs, despite skirmishings with the doctor after certain nights when pain had made it impossible for him to sleep. . . .

That was the first Event-unit of his own making. The second was the matter of reporting himself and his whereabouts to Rudolph Altinger. This must be done—for many reasons it must be done. It was his duty to do it—and perhaps to do his duty against all difficulty might somehow be a protective charm to ward off the dreams which, even after the cessation of the drugs, were wont to haunt his sleep whenever he least expected them. They were not, mercifully, as bad as the voices or the pictures—but they were bad enough, particularly the one which recurred. This was a fantastic medley made the more frightful by reason of its perpetual hovering upon the edge of farce. It concerned his triumphal return to Germany and the continual emergence, at the most unlikely and never-to-be-foreseen times and places, of a small and dark-haired and squarely built figure clad incongruously in a brown woolly bathrobe over which was strapped the clumsy bulk of a cork life-jacket. The small figure’s hands were for ever leaving dark stains upon things they touched, and the clipped, precise little voice was for ever championing him to others when there did not seem any need or reason for the implied defence. And it never changed its words; it said, over and over again, whatever the time and place and situation:

“He isn’t bad, you know! He’s going to teach them that an Evil Idea cannot beat a Good Ideal”

And then he would wake, shaking.

So he communicated with Altinger. He had help, her help. It was morning. He said:

“Please: could you write a letter for me? To my employer—my boss. He will be wondering what has happened to me.”

She was by the wide hearth, with her back to him. She was setting fresh flowers in the vases upon the broad mantel. She said:

“Of course I will,” and set down the flowers and brought pen and paper and sat in the chair beside the bed. As always now, she contrived to guard her eyes.

He dictated his letter, slowly. Mr. Altinger would have heard of the train-wreck. He had been hurt in the train wreck, so he had been unable to reach Seattle and complete for Mr. Altinger the business about the site for the house of Mr. Blum. He had been hurt considerably—with a gash in his head and both legs broken—but was recovering well. He was not in a hospital, but a guest in the house of Samaritans who refused to let him be moved.

And so on—stiff and correct and completely beyond any sort of suspicion—provided, of course, that the enemy had no means of proving that he had never been upon the train. And that they had was most highly improbable, since the wreck had been so complete, with so many servants of the railroad company beyond doubt killed.

He had done his duty, anyhow, to the best of his ability—he had notified his commanding officer. He hoped and believed that the charm would work and that the dreams would be banished.

But, strangely, they were not. They grew, instead, worse and more frequent, so that he became haunted not only by the fear and memory of them but also by the revived fear that he might unwittingly betray himself and the Machine. He did not know, although he kept on telling himself that he did, which fear was the worse. He grew afraid of sleep—yet knew that sleep was essential: he was imprisoned in a relentless circle.

But at last he found solution to the problem: he found that if sleep came when she was with him in the room, he dreamed of her or not at all, and was safe.

He said to her:

“Please: I have something to ask you,” and she suddenly stopped in what she was doing and stood absolutely still, like a picture of arrested motion. She was sideways to him and he could not see her face. She said:

“What is it?” and her voice was different; it was still and controlled and the words came stiffly. He was alarmed by this difference.

“Please do not be annoyed with me. But there is something you can do; something that will help me. . . . I sound like a child—but I can only sleep rightly if you are here when I begin to sleep.”

Her strange stillness broke then. She set down the things she was carrying on the bedside table. She did not look at him, but at what she was doing. She said:

“Oh—I see. All right—don’t worry.” Her voice wasn’t different any more, but deep and cool and clear and perhaps even softer than he had known it.

That was all she said—but he knew that now she would always be with him when sleep was coming. And she was, and he slept nearly always without the dreams. . . .

That was the second Event-unit of his own making, and the last one of any importance. The other, objective fillings-in of the timeless map were many, very many. But he knew them all.

He knew them all. This house was named Los Robles. It was less than ten miles from the Palitos viaduct. Her name was Clare—Clare Ingolls. The doctor’s name was Brandt. He had a wound in his head, but the skull was not fractured. There were three coloured servants, but the only one he had seen was Lena, who helped to nurse him and was tall and bronze-coloured and Amazonian and very happy. His left shin was broken in one place, his right in three. It was known immediately that the wreck of the train was the work of saboteurs. Los Robles had been built by and belonged to Waldemar Ingolls, the father of Clare. Altinger had received his letter. Altinger was in New York and had telephoned two or three times to ask how he was and tell him not to worry and offered to have him moved to a San Francisco hospital, but the Ingolls had preferred to keep him. This room where he lay was called the big guest-room. He was here because at the sound and news of the wreck the whole scattered community of the countryside had turned out to see and help and there had been a shortage of ambulances in this lonely place and Waldemar Ingolls had found him near the dead woman whom he had pulled out from beneath the wreckage. Clare’s mother was not alive. Dr. Brandt was very pleased with his progress. No one had known his name until he had been able to tell them it was Jorgensen: they thought he must somehow have lost his purse or wallet, to have nothing on him at all which gave any clue to his identity. Waldemar Ingolls was a tall, lean giant of a man: he had iron-grey hair and a deeply tanned face and hard, direct grey eyes which looked very straight at you and were always softening suddenly and wrinkling at their corners when he smiled or laughed, which was often, but never without reason. Several newspaper reporters had called at the house to see the wreck-victim, but had been turned away. . . .

All this and more he knew—and he knew also that he had not betrayed himself.