I have blotted it again. Last night I decided that since there seems no possible chance of securing Sally’s conscious aid, I must attempt to hypnotise her, and force her into helping me unconsciously. The idea was intensely repugnant to me, but desperate ills call for desperate remedies; and if ever a man was desperate, I am.
This morning, after we had been out on the terrace for about ten minutes, I tried the trick that had worked so well with Deb. I said that I had got a fly in my eye, and asked her to fish it out.
In an instant she rounded on me, called me an ‘unscrupulous young brute’ and proceeded to flay me with her tongue. I suppose that before Helmuth sacked Deb he got out of her particulars of how I had gone to work in her case. Anyhow he had told Sally about it the first night that she dined with him and warned her to be on her guard in case I attempted the same trick on her. Worse, he inferred that I had not only used the hypnotic control that I succeeded in acquiring over Deb to force her to help me to escape, but had used it before that to secure her unwilling cooperation in indulging my immoral aberrations.
Of course I hotly denied it; but that got me nowhere; and I don’t wonder now that Sally takes such a dim view of me. She said that she would have thrown up the case and gone back to London days ago if she had not realised that when these fits seize me I am not responsible for my actions. So all I have succeeded in doing is to strengthen her conviction that I am an erotomaniac, and, this morning, made a most despicable attempt to make her my unwilling victim.
By this afternoon Helmuth will have been gone two days; and that is just half the period of grace that I have been granted. I have shot both my bolts with Sally, and have not another round of any kind left in the locker.
Later
It was Sally’s afternoon off and she went down to the village; but there is nothing much to do there, so after tea she came up to sit with me. She was in a much more pleasant mood and, without exactly apologising, she inferred that she was sorry about having flared out at me as she did this morning. She said that I am so normal most of the time that she is apt to forget that my mind is unbalanced, so goes off the deep end when these occasional evidences of my malady occur, instead of calmly ignoring them. So I think her early return to keep me company was partly a gesture of the amende honourable variety.
I accepted it as such only too willingly, and after we had talked of trivialities for a bit, she said:
‘I met your ex-nurse, Deborah Kain, in the village post-office this afternoon.’
‘Did you?’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought she had gone back to London.’
‘No. I gather that she is engaged to the village schoolmaster, a man named Gruffydd, and is staying with him and his mother.’
‘What did you think of her?’ I asked.
Sally smiled. ‘Rather a flashy type, isn’t she? I mean not at all the sort of person one would expect to find in these parts; or anyhow, not dressed the way she was. Her off-smart clothes, silk stockings, high heels and hair-do might have looked all right in Oxford Street, but they were a bit startling for Llanferdrack. I had no idea who she was until she came up and introduced herself. I suppose somebody had pointed me out to her as your new nurse. She asked me how I was liking it up at the Castle.’
‘And what did you say to that one?’ I smiled back.
‘Oh, I was very non-committal,’ Sally shrugged. ‘I’m quite good at minding my own business, and other people’s. I said that Helmuth was charming and you were a pet—which is by no means true all of the time—and asked her why she had chucked up such a pleasant job. That shook her rather; but she took refuge in the fib that, although she had liked both you and the Doctor immensely, when she had become engaged her fiancé had insisted on her leaving so that they could be together more often.’
We laughed a lot over that, as it was so absurdly far off the facts; but it suddenly occurred to me that Sally did not know the real truth about Deb’s relations with Helmuth and myself—only a small part of it, with a number of entirely false additions given her by Helmuth. I knew that it was useless to give her my own version, as she would never believe me, and only get in an ill-humour again from supposing that I was once more attempting to blacken Helmuth in her eyes. But there was one way which, if it did not entirely convince her of the respective parts we had played, might at least arouse doubts in her mind about Helmuth’s veracity.
‘Sally,’ I said, ‘can you keep a secret?’
She nodded.
‘I mean really keep it,’ I went on. ‘To me this one is of vital importance. I want you to give me your word that in no circumstances whatsoever will you disclose it to Helmuth or anyone else without my permission.’
‘I’ll give you my word, then,’ she agreed. ‘All this sounds very mysterious.’
‘No. It’s very down-to-earth, really.’
While I had been speaking the idea in my mind had swiftly developed. I realised that if I was to make this final bid to convince her that Helmuth was a rogue, to give her only the part that Deb had played in the story would be like producing a single slice of a large cake. So I decided to go the whole hog, and went on:
‘Ever since the beginning of May I have been keeping a journal. You must often have seen me scribbling away with one of my stamp albums open on my knees. But I was not making long notes about water-marks, perforations and freak issues, as I pretended; I was entering up my diary, which now runs to over three hundred loose sheets.
‘You believe me to be mad; but you admit that for much the greater part of the time I am perfectly sane, so the great bulk of my writing must have been done when I was normal. My reason for writing the journal was because I believe myself to be the victim of a conspiracy to drive me insane. I hoped that if the conspiracy succeeded, and I was put in a lunatic asylum, some honest person might come across my papers, realise the truth, and take steps to get me out. That is why I have taken considerable pains to prevent anyone here knowing of the existence of this document. You see, they might destroy it; and I regard it as my only remaining lifeline.
‘If you read what I have written you may consider much of it to be the ravings of a lunatic; but it will tell you a great deal about me that you don’t know, and of which independent proof is easily available. It will tell you all about my family and my early life; of the part that Helmuth played in it and of the great financial issues that hang upon the question of my sanity or madness; of the strange school, at which Helmuth was a master, where I was educated, and of how much he has to gain by making people believe that I am mad.
‘If I told you this story myself I’m afraid you would think that I was making great chunks of it up as I went along; but you won’t be able to think that of this account which has been written day by day as a record of events, and of the hopes and fears which have made my life one long battle for these past two months.
‘If I give you these papers will you read them through this evening, and, whatever conclusions you come to, promise faithfully to let me have them back tomorrow morning?’
‘Yes, Toby,’ she said. ‘I promise. And whatever I think I won’t give away what you have been doing. I’d like to read the biographical part especially, as it may help me to help you to get well more quickly if I know more about you. If there are over three hundred pages of it, though, it is going to take a long time to read, so perhaps I had better take them downstairs and start on it now.’
I asked her to get me the albums, extracted the pages I have written in the last few days so that she should not read the entries in which I have confessed my love for her, and gave her the rest.
Looking rather sweetly serious, she took them off with her, while I settled down to make this record of our conversation.
Was I, perhaps, inspired to start this journal before I even knew of her existence, so that she should one day read it? The workings of Providence are sometimes very strange; but perhaps Sally is the ‘honest person’ who will see the truth through the web of lies that Helmuth has spun, and set me free.