The Doll Maker

10

Clare fell ill that night. She had sat through the evening with her books in a corner of the Prefects' Room, hearing the chatter of the group of Sixth−Formers round the fire, knowing that they eyed her curiously from time to time, but taking no part whatever in their society. She had long felt herself isolated from Paston Hall life, but now she knew herself cut off from all life, expunged from the design. He had talked of tranquillity if she obeyed him, but there was no tranquillity such as she had known earlier, only a sad apathy. She could not keep her eyes from filling with tears, nor suppress the sighs that swelled at intervals and distended her heart unbearably. She could no longer think clearly and actively; she could see images and words with her mental vision, but she could not reason about them. The pictures of the afternoon were there, but they were static and they excited no feelings—or none beyond this immeasurable sadness. She could see a picture of the immediate future, too: Jennifer in the lamplight of the studio, Jennifer with wild excitement in her sparkling blue eyes, playing with him, leaping to his arms; and yet Clare could feel no fear, no anxiety, nothing that could serve as a stimulus to action. Then she could read, written on the page of her memory, the words Miss Geary had spoken that afternoon; they were clear and definite, she saw their shape, but she could not read their significance. She could dwell on them until they were magnified as by an enormous lens, until one phrase filled all her vision, and one word towered like a mountain before her; yet she could not tell what it meant.

She could see that Miss Geary understood or guessed what Niall was doing; she could see that the old lady was aware that some conclusion had been reached between Niall and her that afternoon in Brackenbine. Clare saw her shutting the gate of Brackenbine, which never had been shut, as a sign that she knew that she would never go there again. Miss Geary understood, but Clare felt neither alarm nor hope in seeing that. She was beyond all apprehension of human displeasure now, and equally beyond all expectation of human aid.

The physical weakness that had become a familiar accompaniment of Niall's embrace, had today lasted longer than she had ever known it, and with it there were sensations she had never felt before: a dull aching in all her bones and joints and an alternate tingling and numbness in her arms and legs, and sometimes her hands and feet felt mortally cold. Before supper−time she had a violent headache, her face burned and swift pains stabbed behind her eyes.

She could eat no supper, but crept slowly up to her own room. Only by an effort of will did she reach the top corridor, and there she could get no further than the bathroom. She was sick until her legs would no longer support her, and she sank to the floor.

It was Reenie Ford who found her a few minutes later; Reenie, apologising rather nervously for having followed her up, confessing to having noticed that Clare was looking ill; and it was Reenie who, having helped her to her own room, went and found the Under−matron.

Clare did not know much of what else happened that night. She was aware of being carried down, swathed in blankets, to the Matron's room on the ground floor, and from there through the short passage to the Sanatorium, a spacious room with sashed windows which contained half−a−dozen cots where the Matron could look after any children who were too unwell to be left in their dormitories. She was aware of having her temperature taken by the Matron, of being looked at, very briefly, by Miss Sperrod, and then by Miss Geary and a number of other people. There were whisperings and stealthy movements round her.

Then time became nothing but a forest of pain in which there was no other living thing but herself. She struggled in thickets that held her, tore and bruised her, and all her efforts, so fierce that they made her moan, were ineffectual. She was bound down by all her limbs, and within, tortured by forces that gripped and ground every bone.

Only after a very long time, after many hours of struggle, when her efforts to free herself from her bonds were no more than convulsive twitchings which went on of their own accord, did she find that somewhere at the centre of a frightening melee in her skull, some processes of the mind were going on. She was observing something other than her own endurance of pain. Someone was trying to get in through an aperture—a window that was shut. It was some other girl and she was frantic to get in, and Clare was struggling to wrench open the window and help her in. But she could not, for the window was made of the bone of her own skull and the wrenching, battering pain mounted unbearably. She could only scream the girl's name aloud; scream so that someone would come and help them; but the hammering on the bones of her head swelled so loud it drowned the utmost effort of her lungs. She saw the other girl's face distorted through glass that bent and pulsed with the swinging blows; the face advanced and receded, always contorted, frightened and frightening, yet recognisable; and still Clare screamed out her name and could not hear what she screamed.

At last all that pain was concentrated in her eyes: it flowed from every corner of her body and gathered there, burning and piercing. But something moved across it now. The images were outside the pain. She shouted again and this time she heard what she shouted, but it was not a scream, only a moan. Someone touched her then, and she became conscious that her eyes were open, that pain was coming into them from without, from a glaring light.

The Matron propped her up and held a cup to her lips.

“My word, you've given us a time,” Clare heard her saying? “Now you'll have to be a bit quieter. I've got another patient to look after, and she's as ill as you are.”

Clare was but too thankful to be able to lie still. It was easier to fight the pain now. Her head and all her limbs still ached, but the mad struggle in her skull had settled down into a ding−dong beat on which she could concentrate, and somehow, by following its rhythm, contrive to endure it.

When she opened her eyes again it was daylight. She had opened them because there were voices near her. She made out the Matron and the Under−matron and a stout white haired man in dark clothes. They began doing things to her, putting something in her mouth, moving her arms up and down. The stout man tapped her legs, and after some time she understood that they were asking her questions. She managed, after several failures, to answer and tell them, yes, she could feel the tapping. That seemed what they wanted to know, and they left her in peace.

The whole of the daylight passed with Clare's mind twining in and out between delirium and consciousness. The images that filled her mind's eye in both states were intermingled: in delirium her visions were reality, and in her waking intervals she thought the figures and faces on which her mind dwelt were dream people. One face above all obsessed her. In her wild tossings in the darkness of pain she knew whose it was, but when her eyes were open it eluded her. She only knew it was the face of a girl with whom she had some connection and some business of vital importance.

There came a period when she lay conscious in a gloaming light. She had been looking for some time at a little glass jar containing a few flowers on the table beside her cot. They were poor little wild flowers—little rounds of yellow on scaly stems without leaves. They seemed most important to her; it seemed essential that they should be there. Then she found that someone was sitting by her in the dusk on the other side of the bed. She tried to turn; someone helped her, and she found that she was looking at Miss Geary. It took her a long time to compose the simple question she wanted to ask, but she managed it:

“What's wrong with me?”

“You've been very ill,” said Miss Geary calmly, “but I think you're getting better now, aren't you?” “Yes,” Clare agreed after a while. “Yes, I am better.”

It was true. The pain in her head had dwindled; her bones had ceased aching, and she could move her eyes without their hurting. She let them travel about the room, pleased that she could use them without pain. They fell on one of the other cots and saw that someone was lying there.

“Who's that?” she asked. “Jennifer Gray,” said Miss Geary.

“Jennifer?” Clare tried to sit up. The girl who was trying to get in at the window must be Jennifer; she must get up and let her in. But before Miss Geary had laid her hand on her she had sunk back again. Of course, the girl at the window was not real, and she could not be Jennifer in any case, because Jennifer was inside, and besides, she recollected quite clearly, the girl at the window had had long fair hair, done in plaits, coiled at her ears, while Jennifer's was short and brown.

She sighed wearily. It would be so good not to have to bother about that other girl. Why could she not go away and leave her alone? She had been trying to get in to her too long.

“How long have I been here?” she asked.

“Why,” said Miss Geary, “two days, I believe. Yes, it was the night before last that you were taken ill. Jennifer was brought in last night. You didn't know anything about that. I came in to see you, but you didn't know me. I was rather worried, you know. I spoke to you, but you only muttered somebody's name over and over.”

“Whose name?” Clare asked. She tried to lift herself again, tried to touch Miss Geary's arm to urge her to hasten with the enlightenment that she so wanted. Miss Geary soothed her with little pats on her hand and restrained her.

“Whose name?” Clare asked again, weakly.

“Why,” said Miss Geary, doubtfully, “I don't think I ought to be tiring you like this. I'm not sure whose name it was. It sounded like Margaret.”

Clare lay too exhausted to speak for a while. But the struggle was over. The strange girl was in now. Perhaps her head would stop aching altogether and that fair−haired girl's business would no longer prevent her from sinking into the deep, tranquil sleep that had been promised her.

Miss Geary had risen. “Is there anything I can get for you?” she asked.

Yes, there might be one way to make sure that the girl did not trouble her any more. It was a great effort for her to find so many words but one by one she shaped and uttered them:

“In my drawer. In my room. Under my hankies. There's a piece of newspaper. Will you bring it me, please?”

Miss Geary did not understand and it had all to be repeated. The strain was so great that Clare had sunk down with closed eyes before she could finish the repetition. She did not know whether Miss Geary had understood or not.

But when it was quite dark she was wakened again by a light on her eyes, and there stood Miss Geary holding out to her a small folded piece of newspaper. Clare looked at the table, but Miss Geary hesitated and finally tucked the paper under Clare's pillow.

“It might blow off the table,” she said.

Clare managed to ask if the window was open.

“Oh yes, only a little. Matron always keeps it a little open.”

That was all right. Clare sank into sleep again reassured. If the window was open and Margaret was here she could go in and out as she pleased without troubling her. Clare, poor, tormented Clare, would be free at last to obey her Master and go quietly to sleep.

She slept, but not the sleep she had resigned herself to. She woke, and with a sense of disappointment which was still strong, though ebbing as her memory began to work, she stared round her at the white walls of the Sanatorium, the enamelled iron bedsteads and the bedside tables. Disillusionment and discontent were her dominant feelings for some time: she was peevishly cross with all the people who, it seemed to her, had lately made glowing promises to her and then meanly cheated her, cajoled and inveigled her into doing things she didn't really want to do and then treacherously left her to bear the consequences.

Her ill−humour with all these people whose names she could not remember persisted, though diminishing, until the Under−matron brought her her breakfast. She was ravenously hungry, and through the act of eating, through seeing and hearing the Under−matron, through sitting up and noticing that her body, her hands and arms and her voice obeyed her, she became convinced that a great alteration had taken place: she was a different person from the one who had been suffering all those miseries, torments and deceptions for half a lifetime. Her head no longer ached; the fever had left her; above all, she could touch and see things and at once perceived their significance. There was nothing interposing between her and reality.

She sat up in bed and used her re−discovered power of reason with increasing excitement. Her thoughts were first to the date. There were only ten days left before the examination for the Oxford Scholarship. She obviously must get well before then. But there was something else of terrible importance that must be done, even before the examination: something connected with another girl. She reasoned quickly now, finding all the events of the last term drop into their proper chronological sequence. The girl she was concerned with could not possibly be the one she had lately dreamed of so much—the one whose blurred picture in the newspaper lay under her pillow now. Margaret Raines was dead.

The revelation came to Clare like a lightning−flash: it was precisely because Margaret had died that she was important to her. She knew exactly how she had died. More than that, Clare knew why Margaret had failed to live as he had designed her to live. In a symbolic sense, Margaret had lived in Clare's dream−haunted delirium; but not for him; rather in rebellion against him. She had not been reborn as his slave because she refused— 'at the last moment,' he had said himself—the submission he demanded. She had resisted in her heart. She had refused to give her heart to animate Niall's image of her. Rebellion was possible—as possible as it was right: Clare had known that deep in her heart all the time, and her knowledge of that fact, clothed by dream imagination in the figure of Margaret Raines, had warred in the darkness of the last three days against Niall's spell. And it had won! Exultantly, Clare gazed about the room, drawing a deep breath of the air of this world. Rebellion had won.

Then her triumphant gaze fell on a sleeping figure in the cot furthest from her. She had exulted too soon. Jennifer lay there, and Jennifer had yielded complete obedience to him. She lay there, alive still, but already in bondage to him, merely abiding the time until he should beckon her into his world. Looking round and listening to make sure that neither the Matron nor her assistant was at hand, Clare slipped out of bed and up to Jennifer's cot. It did not occur to her until she was nearly there that she should have been too ill to walk. She was weak and tired, but she did not feel ill any longer: there was an intense excitement coursing through all her body which nerved her and convinced her of her power to move as she wished and do what she would.

She gave Jennifer one searching look and then regained her own bed. The younger girl was sleeping peacefully. The only change in her that might have been taken for a sign of illness was a flush of heightened colour in her cheeks. She slept with her lips slightly curved in a smile, the picture of utter content and peace. Niall had kept his promise there: Jennifer's few days would be passed in tranquillity. “A few days”—the phrase sounded over and over again in Clare's mind. How many did he mean? Three days had, already passed; the puppets must be almost finished now. He would have worked day and night in his eagerness; she could see him bending over his bench in intense concentration, his skilled fingers working with such certainty and speed, see him opening the press again, looking at those little tubes, preparing for the last task of all, the final task of animation that would be done by his power over the drops of blood that she and Jennifer had freely given. Clare's victory over his spell was illusory: she had won only the briefest respite, and that at a cost of bodily and mental suffering that might all have been avoided, might all have been changed to such peace as Jennifer was now wrapped in if she would have but yielded to him. Now she had only until the moment when he came to place the hearts in his puppets. She found herself speculating whether she would feel it, here, in her bed in the Sanatorium; whether he would do it brutally to punish her for her rebellion, or whether he would be merciful in the end and let her sleep through the change. She wondered which of them he would take first.

She did not know how long a respite she might yet be given: but she could take no chance of its being longer than another day. What could be done must be done this night.

The doctor came in the middle of the morning, and Clare, suppressing her excitement and masking her anxiety for action with assumed listlessness, suffered his examination obediently, smiled wanly at his pleasantries and received his verdict that she was not to get up for another two weeks with an indifference that somewhat disconcerted him. She watched keenly when he passed on from her and stood, with the Matron, looking down at Jennifer. His face was not visible to her when he made his examination. Jennifer still slept, and his visit was brief; Clare wished she could have heard his conversation with the Matron just outside the Sanatorium door.

A little before luncheon, Miss Geary came to see Clare. She spoke regretfully about the scholarship examination, then rather diffidently mentioned the question of letting Clare's parents know about her illness. Clare answered that she was well enough to write herself and would write to her mother the next day. As for the examination she had to grope back in her memory some way to find what she thought and felt about that. It was to take place a few days after the end of the Easter term: but for a long time now she had not believed in it; it had not seemed possible to her that she would ever take it; something so much more powerful had interposed. She listened nevertheless to Miss Geary's kindly efforts to console her, and to her suggestions that perhaps the chance was not entirely lost, that Clare might be able to continue studying at home when her father came to England and settled down. After all, Clare had a year in hand, she was only eighteen. It might even be better to take the examination when she was older....

“Yes,” said Clare. “I have remembered what you said about our duty to grow old.”

Miss Geary left her when the Under−matron brought her lunch, and promised to come and see her again in the evening. Clare ate heartily at luncheon, tea and supper, but the hours between dragged intolerably slowly. The only event of that interminable afternoon was that Jennifer woke.

Clare had been reading, and, lifting her eyes casually from the book she saw that Jennifer was sitting up apparently looking out of the window. She called to her, and Jennifer turned her head. The same slight smile she had worn when she slept still curved her lips. She replied with a single 'Hello,' spoken softly, in a slow, dreamy voice, and her expression did not change. Clare got up and went over to her. Jennifer did not move; she smiled and looked at Clare, but did not answer again when she spoke to her. Clare stared into her eyes: they were wide open but, if they saw anything, the images they received could convey nothing to the brain behind; their blue was of a peculiar dark intensity, which, combined with the high colour of her rounded cheeks and the soft smiling of her parted lips, gave her an appearance of fresh, vital beauty that was like a vivid and premature flowering far exceeding the promise that had been in the bud of her natural childish prettiness. Troubled and frightened, Clare drew away from her, and saw her after a while lie down again, with a gentle, contented sigh, and fall asleep.

That strange, new−flowering beauty in Jennifer's face wrought Clare's anxiety to an unbearable pitch: she believed it to be proof that Niall's work was on the point of completion. At any moment now he might begin, bending there over the bench in the ancient house behind the oak wood, to fill the little cavities in the breasts of his dolls. She pressed her hands to her own heart as if she felt the mortal change beginning there.

When Miss Geary came before supper, she told her of Jennifer's awakening, striving to depict her impression with an earnestness that came near to betraying all her fear. She wished bitterly that she could now tell the whole story to Miss Geary. But it was too late: even if she could make her, or anyone, believe her, the explanations, would be too long and complicated, and before anyone could act after she had at last convinced them, Niall's work would be done. Likelier by far, they would simply take her words for lightheaded ramblings: the doctor would find it so easy to diagnose her complaint as a nervous breakdown through overwork and anxiety about the examination. The only result would be that they would take precautions to stop her doing the one thing that might yet defeat Niall.

Nevertheless, it did seem to her that her manner had conveyed something to Miss Geary. The old lady seemed so much more alert, so much nearer to earth than usual. She did not look down at Clare from the cloudy heights of her plateaux; she watched her very closely with brown eyes somehow less dim, quick to observe and eager to penetrate. She nodded jerkily, as if understanding, but when she spoke it was not about Jennifer at all. It seemed that it was a different matter that had quickened her feelings.

“I've had a letter from one of my cousins,” she said. “One of my cousins in Cornwall. It came by this afternoon's post. She mentions something rather odd. It seems that Rachel Sterne is in Cornwall. She's staying at a hotel in Truro. My cousin's seen her. She met her by chance and she writes that she thinks there's something wrong. Rachel appears to be extremely upset. I can't quite make out what it is, but it seems that she isn't coming back to Brackenbine. As if there has been some trouble, some quarrel.... You know Brackenbine is the son's, not hers...?”

“A quarrel?” Clare repeated faintly. There had come back into her mind a momentary scene in the studio a long time ago. A few grave words, sad, though spoken with a smile— 'If the itch to create were not a sin of pride.... But we can cease. Go our ways and sin no more.' Miss Geary's speculation had hit the truth: Rachel Sterne had recognised that her son's art was evil. She had fled from it, and in the guarded wording of her note, Clare now saw, she had tried to warn her against Niall.

“Yes,” Miss Geary was saying. “I should be so sorry if it were so. But it was a very odd life for them to live there. I don't see how they could have gone on indefinitely....”

It seemed a very long time after supper until the Under−matron had finished attending to Clare and Jennifer, fussing over them, making them comfortable for the night, as she called it, and when at last she went, it was only to impose a further period of suspense on Clare. She paused at the door, looked rather severely at the book Clare was holding, and said:

“You can keep your light on till Matron looks in, but mind you put it out then!”

So Clare fretted another hour or more until the Matron herself appeared. At times in that long anguish she could have laughed wildly at her meek obedience to the familiar, petty rules and regulations of Paston Hall while she awaited execution of a capital sentence—his or her own. But she answered the Matron, when finally she had made her visit, with a calm 'Good−night', and when, an hour later, she slipped out of bed, she had a firm control of herself. Her plan was clear and she had appraised what she might achieve. She would not let herself dwell on her one hope of salvation so that it grew out of proportion to the definite and known dangers she and Jennifer were in. One thing was proved: at the worst she would win the oblivion of real death for both of them. Niall, with all his art, all the unimaginable powers of darkness that he could draw on, could not keep his slaves from escaping into that last freedom. Margaret Raines had proved that. But Margaret had rebelled in her heart alone. Clare had seen more of Niall's art and understood the process of his doll−making better: she saw that the hand, too, might rebel and perhaps win a victory that would give life.

She put on her dressing−gown, put her bare feet into slippers, which were more indoor shoes than slippers, with buckles that held them firmly on, then forced herself to stand for a full minute, listening intently by the open window. The school was quiet, and there was no light falling from any window on the side where she looked out. She groped back across the Sanatorium to Jennifer's cot, listened to her regular breathing for a moment; then, after one brief caress of the younger girl's hair, returned to the window and quietly raised the sash.

The night was overcast, but not absolutely dark; enough faint moonlight filtered through the clouds to show Clare her way round the building. Lights were showing behind the curtains of some rooms on the upper floors and she went cautiously, taking advantage of the cover the shrubs afforded until she could strike across the grounds to the little beech copse by the wall. She found herself trembling, not from cold or fear, but from the simple exertion of walking after her fever and the lying in bed. To climb over the wall, she knew, would task her strength now, but it was the only way: the main gates of Paston Hall would be locked, and though there was a way out to the road through the gardener's cottage garden, fear of the dog prevented her attempting that. She set herself deliberately to control the shaking of her limbs and to save her strength by moving much more slowly and steadily than her anxiety urged. Even with that deliberation she had to make two attempts before she could gain the top of the wall behind the great beech−tree. She sat there several minutes, resting before lowering herself down on the Brackenbine side.

She was more familiar with Brackenbine grounds now than she had been on the two former occasions when she had been over the wall, and she had only to keep going straight through the woods, uphill, to reach the drive that wound round the slope from the gates to the house; then the house would lie some way to her left along the drive. With a good deal of bruising and scratching of her ankles and feet she made her way through the wood, and once on the drive, she stood and listened before going on, for she knew Niall's habit of ranging about the estate by night—indeed, her plan was partly built on that—and the noise she had made in pushing through the wood had filled her with fear that he might intercept her. Nothing stirred, however, except the branches in the slight breeze, and she carried on, stepping very cautiously, towards the house.

It was in darkness. She saw that thankfully: it meant that Niall was in truth out, as she had hoped, for he would not have been in bed at this hour if he had been at home. Groping forward to feel the wall for a guide, she moved to the right, round the side of the house, by a slippery little path overgrown with high laurels. It was pitch−dark and smelt of damp and decaying leaves and earth in perpetual shade where nothing could grow but the evergreens. The path sloped so steeply that she had to feel for boughs of the laurels and haul herself up by them. It was an agonising, slow business, and she felt she could have walked two miles by the road with less fatigue and in less time, but at last she came out under the oaks again, with the gutter of the house no higher than her knees. She sat and rested there again, listening all the time for some sound above her own alarmingly loud breathing. But all the slight sounds that her ear could catch seemed to her only the natural noises of the night woods.

For the next part of her enterprise she took off her shoes: she had seen before how leather soles slipped on the tiles. Pressing with the palms of her hands and her bare feet she managed better, and very painfully and slowly, crept up the slope of the roof until she could get a grip on the skylight frame. As she had expected, the skylight was open a foot or two at the bottom, and, remembering how she had done it before with Niall, she was able to wriggle herself sideways through and drop down into the studio.

She waited until her breathing became easier, though no pausing could quieten the heavy thumping of her heart, and then moved across the dark room, feeling her way between tables and boxes and all the miscellaneous litter towards the fireplace where a few embers were still alive. Her first care was then to secure the door. The key was in the lock on the inside, where she had always seen it. She turned it, and for additional security dragged one of the armchairs up and wedged its back under the long iron key. There were piles of books and papers in the corner by the fireplace; she groped and tore a piece which she twisted into a spill, and then, kneeling, blew on the embers until she had a flame. It showed her where the lamp was, and with a second spill she lit it and carried it into the middle of the room, setting it down on the end of Niall's bench.

She leaned against the bench and for a moment or two gave way to weakness now that the first part of her task was completed. It had been the part where she most ran the risk of failure and it had cost her the greatest effort of will and bodily strength. Chance had favoured her: Niall was out, but he might return at any minute. To try to do what she had to do when he was there would be infinitely harder—so difficult, indeed, that she could not see how she had ever hoped it might be possible when she had planned her course on the supposition that he might be at home.

The place was as untidy as usual. Niall had cleared his work from the bench but left all his tools out. She considered the plywood press where he kept the puppets, and picked up a wood−chisel and fell to work on the door. Not caring now what noise she made, she chopped and jabbed at the panels of the door vainly for a few minutes until it occurred to her to try to force the lock by leverage. Then, thrusting the chisel between the door and the frame she wrenched violently at it. The tool was too delicate and the blade broke in two with a loud ringing sound. Clare rushed to the bench again, and tumbling the tools about, found something that would do better—a long stout screwdriver. She made herself pause and think and having recovered a little calmness, went more methodically to work, and, as the lock was only a small one, in a short time she was able to burst it from the frame.

The two dolls lay there on the second shelf; all but complete now, their limbs fitted on, the hair in place, the painting finished; one thing only remained to be done: the filling of the cavity in the breast. Even in her fearful anxiety to be done and to escape from Brackenbine as fast as she could, Clare felt a strong curiosity to examine her own puppet now that it was finished, and she could not repress a gasp of admiration at the perfection of the little figure which she took, almost shyly, up in her hands. As she had seen earlier, it was an idealised portrait; yet it was she, and she saw with a pang of some feeling that ran counter to all her purpose, that the very characteristics which Niall had caught so well were those he had so often said he loved in her and praised above conventional prettinesses. She felt the stirrings of a desire to keep the doll; hints of arguments that she might keep it in its incomplete state without risk began to whisper in her mind. It needed all her determination—the very firmness that Niall's fine chisel had expressed in the wood —to seize the thing, turn its features from her, and banish its flattery from her mind. Jennifer's startled her, the dark−blue eyes shone so softly up at her and the features of the doll so exactly reproduced in colouring and expression the face Jennifer had turned to her that afternoon. The correspondence between these little wooden things and the living beings they were so darkly and intimately connected with frightened her, so that her heart palpitated and her hands shook as though what she was about to do was indeed a destruction of life; and a dreadful fear assailed her as she laid the dolls on the bench that at this late stage their nexus with herself and Jennifer might in fact be physical. What if when she struck, blood should spout from the little bodies, and she should hear a shriek? With the courage of extreme horror, she set the blade of a broad chisel across the neck of Jennifer's doll, laid face down so that she might not see its smile, and swinging a mallet, struck down with all her might.

The blade bit into the wood, and with a great sob Clare saw that it was but wood. Still, heart−stricken at destroying so beautiful and ingenious a thing, and in frenzied haste to be done, she struck and struck again; then seized her own and, uttering scarcely sane sounds of grief and terror, hacked and battered that small body also. The wood was very hard and she had gone too wildly about the work; she was not damaging the torsos much after chopping off the limbs. In sheer pity she was forced to stop; the savagery of the prolonged, crude dismemberment was too appalling. She could not think what was the right tool to use, the right way to go about the work: she had no longer control of her hands sufficient to use any tool effectively. She glanced distractedly round, and sight of the fireplace prompted her what to do. Sobbing and shuddering she flew about the room, tearing armfuls of straw and shavings from the old packing−cases that stood about, splintering bits of box−lids, wrenching canvas stretchers apart, heaping a pyre above the white ashes in the wide fireplace.

A vision of the day when she had saved Margaret Raines' doll from the flames came back into her mind, and she moaned to remember the love that had led her to this deed now at this hour. But she held to her purpose and, kneeling, she blew and blew at the embers until the straw and shavings caught fire; then running back to the bench she gathered up the gashed little bodies and the severed limbs, gathered up every chip of the dolls that she could find, and put them all in the heart of the fire.

Desperately as she wanted to escape now, she saw that she must stay until the things were consumed. She backed away from the fire, watching it burn up. The straw blazed with a soft roar and the dry packing−case wood kindled with crackings like pistol−shots and sent sparks flying far into the room. She watched, and gradually became a little calmer; her blind horror of the deed itself subsided and the more reasonable fear of being caught by Niall beset her. She dragged forward a small table, crowded with bottles of oil, tubes of paint and tins of turpentine, to stand under the skylight, and swept some of the stuff off on to the floor to give her footing so that she could climb up again. But in the act of doing so she stopped and in intense agitation struck herself violently on the brow, crying aloud: “O God!”

In that ghastly mimicry of butcher's work on the dolls she had forgotten the very heart of the matter: the hearts, indeed, that should fill those hollowed breasts. To leave the drops of life−blood that she and Jennifer had given was to leave themselves still in his power: that much he had let her divine. The dolls, which, because of their astounding likeness, had seemed to be the bodies of his slaves, were after all only inanimate things—things that he could make again: the power of animation dwelt in the small tubes she had glimpsed.

She snatched up the lamp and went back to the cupboard. The tubes had stood in a little wooden rack on the top shelf when she had seen inside the press with Niall that last day. She peered among the collection of glass apparatus and with mounting panic saw that they had been moved. Heedless what more damage she did she thrust and threw the whole contents of the shelf aside. The tubes were not there. Down on her knees she raked out all the contents of the bottom shelf—a collection of models and parts of beautiful toy−like things that formerly she would have lingered over in delight for hours. She dragged out the Captain's coach, searched every corner of the shelves and finally, convinced of failure, stood up, her hand pressed to her mouth, utterly at a loss, only able to groan to herself: 'O God! O God! I can't find them!' She wept, with a kind of feeble self−pity, fear and despair robbing her for a few minutes of all power to think clearly. Then she mastered herself again. There were other presses in the room.

She took up the lamp from the floor where she had set it and lifted it high, turning round to look up and down the great shadowy room. Her eye fell on one cupboard of a different design from the rest. It was made of hardwood, and was of stouter, more workmanlike construction than the others. If only she had kept her wits she would have pitched on that at once as the likeliest place for something valuable to be stored. She had seen it before, but never open.

Going back to the bench she put down her lamp and looked for her screwdriver again. She found it on the floor and began to labour at the lock of the strong press. It cost her far more effort than the other, and though she jabbed and levered and wrenched until all her fingers were cramped and her arms ached and refused to serve her without frequent rests, she could make little impression on the lock. Her mind hunted for old lessons of experience to help her, and found them at last in memories of childhood: watching her father working with tools, deliberately and methodically in an engineer's way. She straightened her back and thought the task out.

There was a saw hanging on the wall by the bench; she fetched it, and setting the lamp on the table that she had placed under the skylight to give her a better light, she sawed, clumsily but effectively, through the corner of the press above and below the lock. Then inserting her screwdriver once more in the nick of the door, she wrenched and prized until at last she rived away the wood that held the socket of the lock. The first thing that met her eye, in the front of the top shelf, was the little rack of tubes that she was looking for. She snatched the whole rack down, gave one glance at the little gouts of dark substance two of them contained, then ran with them to the fire which by now was a glowing pile of coals. She thrust the rack as it was into the heart of the red coals, then snatched up more bits of wood and heaped them over it. She could trust no method of destruction but the utterly consuming action of the flames. She ran back into the middle of the room for more wood, flinging down piles of canvases, overturning bottles and tins of brushes to drag out cases from behind the lumber stacked between the presses. She flung on fuel until there was a great fire roaring and crackling, sending a spray of sparks up the chimney.

Then, as she passed the press from which she had taken the tubes, staggering with a big packing−case full of straw in her arms, something caught her eye. She dropped her burden and went back to the press. On bursting it open she had seen nothing but the rack of tubes. Now she saw that the top shelf contained pieces of apparatus similar to those in the other press she had opened, but below that the cupboard was entirely filled with a stack of trays, one upon another like shallow drawers, with an inch or so of space between each one. Through one of these gaps her eye had caught a gleam of something fine and glossy like light−coloured spun silk, or hair.

She pulled out the drawer, and there, in neat compartments lined with soft stuff, lay orderly rows of puppets, each small figure, naked, upon its back, with hands folded on its breast, lying in its little cell as in a coffin. Clare pulled out another drawer, and another. They were all full of dolls, all arranged in the same corpse−like fashion. She bent down, and, though the lamp and fire together did not show a good light into the drawers, she made out that the eyes of each doll were shut. They had the appearance of dead people, but she knew they were not dead. These figures had no open cavity in their breasts: the element of animation was in them, suspended in a death−like sleep.

She stood, unable to move or take her eyes from the figures, while the full import of her discovery penetrated her. This ultimate deception appalled and desolated her more than all the hurt she had had, than all the terror that had grown in her since the truth of Niall's art first began to dawn upon her. The things she had seen in the Captain's Park were neither mechanical dolls as she had thought then, nor living beings, as, in spite of all reason, she had concluded later. Life of a sort, or some astounding substitute for life they must have, but it was an animation that could only appear at their master and maker's bidding. The undying life Niall promised was a lie: his people were only toys whom he alone could cause to move. All their sports, their gaiety, their loves and laughter, were but games he made them play for his amusement, and then, when he was tired of playing, he laid them like toys back in their boxes until such time as he felt in the mood for them again. This was the immortality and unchanging youth to which Niall would have condemned Jennifer and her, to which he had condemned... Understanding what had been done to give these small things their life−in−death, Clare covered her eyes and backed, cold in all her limbs, toward the table under the skylight.

She reached it, and then, slowly, as though moved against the utmost resistance of her will, she lowered her hand and turned her eyes to the door. Heavily up the stairs came a tramp of feet, loud above the crackling of the fire, hasty on the wooden stairs, rushing across the landing outside. Clare could not move, her eyes only travelled slowly to the great iron key on which the firelight glinted. The thick oak door shook under the hammering of a fist and then she heard a voice shouting: “Open! Open the door!”

It was a voice she knew, but there was a note in it she had never heard, never imagined it could ever sound. A grief so deep that it engulfed even her last dreadful discovery in its own abyss of pain opened suddenly in her breast at the recognition that it was Niall who howled at her with such inhuman menace. In the pain of that appalling change the last threads of the spell that had once bound her dissolved; blinded by tears she turned and mounted the table. She gripped the edge of the skylight frame and gave a great spring upwards. The little table rocked and went crashing over with all its load and the burning lamp. Clare, struggling through the aperture, saw the pool of flame spread out below her as the paraffin and the spilt oil from the bottles caught light, and as she slithered down the roof, saw the whole great square of glass suddenly illuminated by an unbroken yellow blaze and felt the hot draught rush down on her.

She ran, staggering and fending herself off from the trees with outstretched arms, down the steep bank away from the house; down into the drive where she wheeled and, faint and sick, tried to run on towards the gates of Brackenbine.