Murchison had no difficulty whatever in getting to sleep when he retired to bed for the second time that night. He was as completely exhausted by his strafe as if he had done a long cross-country run. As soon as his head touched the pillow he was off, and knew nothing more till he felt himself being shaken, and looked up to see the grinning Luigi standing over him in broad daylight.
‘Mistaire Brangwyn, he ring the telephone, but you hear noting. He send me ask whether you ‘live or dead?’
‘Tell him I'm alive, will you, Luigi?’ said Murchison, rolling out of bed. But as soon as be began to move about he was not quite so sure. He felt as if he were getting up for the first time after a long illness. Virtue had gone out of him with a vengeance.
When he arrived down in the dining-room after a hasty toilet, he found Brangwyn and his sister lingering over the after-breakfast cigarettes, and began to apologize for his tardiness. This was not the sort of thing that is expected of an employee.
‘How are you feeling, Murchison?’ inquired Brangwyn.
‘So-so. A bit as if I'd had a night on the tiles. To tell you the honest truth, I'm feeling rather cheap,’ was the reply.
‘Rather like a Leyden jar that has discharged its spark?’
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘I thought you would. That is because you are not in circuit. If you had been in circuit with Ursula, you would have been all right. I must show you that trick before we have any more of these doings.’
‘Oh lor!’ said Murchison, ‘are we likely to have ‘em regularly?’ and he gazed in anguish at Miss Brangwyn, wondering whether it were to be his mission in life to clutch her to his bosom periodically.
‘I am afraid we are likely to have one or two more attempts before they give it up as a bad job,’ said Brangwyn, trying to speak casually. ‘So we may as well get the circuit in working order so as to be prepared for all eventualities. Go on, Ursula, you little vamp, charge him up again.’
Ursula flushed scarlet, and flashed an angry look at her brother.
‘I'm afraid I can't,’ she said. ‘I don't feel like it.’
‘Go on, my child. It's the least you can do. He's run himself out for you.’
The girl rose reluctantly and advanced towards the embarrassed Murchison, who wondered what in the world was going to be done to him.
‘Put the palms of your hands against hers and enter into it imaginatively. Take what she is going to give you,’ commanded Brangwyn.
Murchison, looking about as receptive as a shying horse. did as he was bid. He felt a pair of small, cold palms pressing against his. Nothing happened. Ursula Brangwyn looked so cross and uncomfortable that he forgot his own embarrassment in feeling sorry for her. He thought he felt a faint tingling warmth coming into the palms, but before he could be sure it was not his imagination, she withdrew them.
‘It's no good, I can't do it. My hands are cold,’ she said, and walked out of the room.
Brangwyn made no comment on her going, but lit another cigarette and sat down to chat to Murchison while he ate his breakfast.
‘Well, you've seen something of our goings-on. What do you make of them?’
‘I dunno. Not much, I'm afraid,’ said Murchison, who felt half dead, and was praying that the hot coffee would put sufficient life into him to enable him to get through his day's work.
Brangwyn looked at him sharply. ‘You'll be all right shortly,’ he said, ‘don't worry about it. Take life easily till you pick up. There's nothing much to do at the moment.’
Murchison smiled a sickly smile. ‘Am I a psychological car-smash?’ he inquired.
‘Good Lord, no, my dear lad. Your battery's run down, that's all that's the matter with you. You'll be all right as soon as you get going again.’
‘Well,’ said Murchison. rising limply from the table, ‘someone will have to swing my starting-handle for me, for devil a spark can I get out of myself.’
He went languidly up to his own quarters, and found there a char bumping about with a sweeper; he turned and went out on to the roof-garden and dropped on to a seat in the angle of the walls like a sick cat crawling into a patch of sunlight.
The pale winter sun was doing its best, and there was quite appreciable warmth in the angle of the walls, open to the south and sheltered from the wind. He turned his face up to it, shutting his eyes against the bright light, and let the sunshine beat upon his skin, feeling instinctively that this was the one thing that could restore his drained vitality.
He did not know that he was being observed through the glass door that led out on to the roof-garden, nor that Ursula Brangwyn, obeying the same instinct as himself, had come up, seeking the sunlight. Neither did he hear the door opened quietly, and the girl cross the leads on tiptoe and stand beside him, an expression of resolution on her face, as if she had at last made up her mind to some irrevocable plunge.
But she did not put her resolution into action at once, but stood looking down at the oblivious man on the seat, considering him. Murchison, believing himself to be alone and under no necessity of keeping up appearances, had abandoned himself to his exhaustion, and lay back in the corner of the seat looking utterly worn out, his head against the rough brickwork of the wall, the pitiless sunlight beating down on his face and revealing all the lines in it, and his frayed collar, and every crease and threadbare patch in his shabby clothes. The girl, gazing down at him critically, had a sudden revulsion of feeling for this man who looked like a tramp, and her resolution wavered.
She could not go through with this thing. It was impossible. Her whole fastidious soul rose in revolt. And then she bethought herself of what her position would be if she did not go through with it. She heard her brother's voice saying, ‘Give it a fair trial, Ursula. It can't hurt you to give it a fair trial. I won't ask you to do more than that. If it doesn't come off, there's no harm done; and if it does, it will be all right. You needn't worry about that. I know what I am talking about. If it comes off on these lines it will be a much bigger thing than ever it was with Frank.’
And she had replied. ‘I suppose you fancy you are one of those old priest-kings of Atlantis?’
And he had answered, ‘I was once, my child; or so I think.’
A strange thing, reincarnation, mused the girl, gazing down at the face of the man in front of her, who seemed to have dropped off to sleep. What had this man been in past lives? Had he ever had any connection with her? She thought not. There was no responsive stirring of memory within her at his approach. It was not like Frank, whom she had known at once. They had rushed together like twin souls. For once she doubted her brother's wisdom when he said that this thing, if it came off, would be far bigger than the thing with Fouldes could ever have been. He looked a pretty hopeless proposition, this rough, trampish individual who had shaved exceedingly sketchily, whose tie was like a bootlace, and whose hair badly wanted cutting.
But her brother's voice came back to her, saying, ‘I only ask you to give it a fair trial, Ursula.’ If she tried to pick up a rapport with Murchison, and failed to do so, nothing would happen and no harm would be done. But if she tried and succeeded - what then? Titania and Bottom? Ursula was not particularly anxious to succeed, desperate as her situation was if something could not be done to break the evil influence that had got her so completely under its sway.
She stood looking down at the man, studying his face and hesitating. Alick had said he was thirty-two, five years older than herself; but he looked much older than that. She had thought before that his expression was sulky and bad-tempered, but it did not look like that now. He simply looked very weary, and melancholy almost to hopelessness. She remembered he had said that he had been out of a job and at the end of his resources when he had obtained this engagement with her brother, and the anger rose up within her that a man with his fine War record should have been reduced to that. She thought of Frank Fouldes. He was younger than Murchison, and had just missed the War; and, in any case, he was most emphatically not a fighting man, declaring that nothing would induce him to bear arms in the event of another war, and lend himself to the inhuman folly of slaughter. Ursula pondered which was the better man, the simple-souled fighter, who had armed and marched at the first call of his country, or the intellectual, who had set his face against war? Reason was on the side of Fouldes; but a deep-seated and stubborn instinct answered to Murchison. Ursula found herself wishing that there had been something of Murchison in Frank Fouldes; if there had been, she felt, the debacle with Astley would never have occurred, and she would have been happily married by now. She recognized the tougher fibre of the rough-looking individual in front of her, and she had had a searing experience of ‘the brittle intellectuals, who snap beneath a strain’; nevertheless, a bullock is a poor exchange for a stag.
Ursula Brangwyn felt bitter and disillusioned at that moment and very disinclined to go on with the experiment, especially as the man on the seat slumped down into an untidy heap as his sleep became deeper, and looked less attractive than ever. She gazed with repugnance at the grime of the old trench-coat he was wearing; evidently a relic of the War. How grubby it was! Fancy not sending it to the cleaners! She wondered how he had managed to get those curious streaks of dirt on the shoulders, and suddenly realized that those must be the marks made by the straps of a haversack. She had been old enough to remember the War days vividly, and there came back to her a scene at a railway station, with men clad just like this one lying asleep on benches, and something in her esteemed very highly these men who had stood between her and destruction. Murchison was forgiven his unsightliness. Just so did war-worn men sleep when they came out of the trenches.
As Ursula stood musing before him, Murchison slid yet lower on the seat, and cracked his neck at an angle that awakened even him; and opening his eyes as he heaved himself up on his hard couch, he saw the girl standing before him. He looked at her in surprise for a moment, and then got clumsily to his feet, stiff from sleeping in a constrained position.
Ursula plunged without more ado.
‘I was so sorry I couldn't magnetize you just now,’ she said, speaking quickly and nervously, ‘it just wouldn't work. I don't know why. One has to feel in the mood for those things. But I'll do you now, if you like.’
Murchison looked down at her quizzically.
‘What is it you propose to do to me, Miss Brangwyn?’
‘Don't you understand these things?’
‘I'm afraid I don't. They're all Greek to me.’
‘But Alick said you knew a lot about them?’
‘I'd never heard of ‘em when I came to the flat a couple of days ago.’
The girl, who had been holding out her hands towards him, expecting him to press his palms against them, dropped her arms to her sides and stared at him in perplexity.
‘Then - then you haven't had things explained to you?’
‘No, Miss Brangwyn, I've had nothing explained to me. I am not paid to ask questions. I'm paid to do as I'm told.’
The girl went scarlet to the roots of her hair, and he wondered why. His remark had seemed to him innocent enough. He had evidently uttered some sort of double entendre without knowing it, and had better make haste to explain himself.
‘Your brother told me that you had had a psychological car-smash over these blighters, and asked me if I'd bring the breakdown van out to you, where you were ditched. He gave me to understand that you and he and Fouldes had been doing some sort of psychological experiment, when Astley buffed in and shunted you off the rails, and he wants to repeat the experiment with me in the place of Fouldes, up to the point where it ran off the line, so that he can get you back on the rails, as it were. That's all I know about it. I don't want to pry into your affairs. I know Brangwyn, and I trust him. His word is good enough for me.’
Ursula Brangwyn looked at him with a strange expression on her face, which he could not fathom.
‘And what do you suppose will be the next move after I am back on the rails?’
‘I've no idea. Brangwyn said he would help me to get another job when he no longer needed me.’
The girl laughed a sudden, nervous laugh that had no mirth in it.
‘Do you realize that if we do this experiment, and it - it comes off, you will never get rid of me? Never - never - never.’
‘Good Lord, what do you mean?’
‘That - that if we establish the magnetic circuit that Alick wants us to establish, it can't be broken - that is, not easily.’
‘I understood that he intended to use me as a kind of scaffolding while you were rebuilding, and that when the job was done I should be taken down and carted away.’
‘Did he say that?’
‘Well, no, not exactly. That was how I worked it out.’
‘Then you worked it out wrong. You will be built into the structure if this goes through.’
‘I don't know what you mean, Miss Brangwyn. This is all beyond me. I wish you'd speak plainly.’
The girl looked at him silently for a moment.
‘You'd better ask my brother,’ she said, and turned on her heel and walked off.
But when she got to the glass door leading back into the house, she did not pass through it, but seemed to change her mind, hesitated, and then turned and walked towards the embrasure where she had stood with Murchison the previous day, showing him the view, and leant there, with her elbows on the brickwork and her chin in her hands, staring out over London.
She remained there for a considerable time, Murchison watching her in perplexity, puzzling over her words and trying to make out their significance, piecing two and two together in the light of what he already knew, but not getting very far.
Suddenly she turned and came towards him, and he rose to meet her.
‘Do you realize,’ she said, ‘that the experiment is already well under way, and it is too late to back out, even if we want to?’
‘I am afraid I don't know anything about it, Miss Brangwyn, and my brain's completely addled this morning.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘A bit limp.’
‘You're feeling more than a bit limp. You're feeling rotten.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know what's been done to you.’
‘And what may that be?’
‘You took what was meant for me and short-circuited it.’
‘I am afraid I'm none the wiser.’
She looked at him in silence.
‘Alick is perfectly right. There is only one thing to do for you, and there is only one thing to do for me. Hold out your hands. No, like that, fingers up. Now press your palms against mine.’
He did as he was bid. There was no need to bid him enter into the experiment imaginatively now. The girl's feelings were evidently deeply stirred, strive as she would to hide them, and her emotion infected him. He felt her hands trembling as she pressed her palms hard against his, but they were no longer cold, but burnt with a kind of dry, electric heat that pricked and tingled against his flesh as if an electric current were coming through them.
He felt himself take a deep breath involuntarily, and then everything faded out except the girl's face, with its great dark eyes fixed on his.
He was aware of nothing save the tingling in his palms and a sense of glowing warmth that was spreading slowly all over him. It was like taking an anaesthetic. How long it lasted, he never knew, but at length the girl stepped back, panting, withdrawing her palms from his, and the spell was broken. He found himself standing in the roof-garden in the pale winter sunlight facing a girl whose cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright and starry, and a curious smile on her lips. Something had been done to him; something very definite had been done to him, but he did not know what.
But, whatever it was, it had restored him to normal. He no longer felt that terrible drained sensation, as if he had had a bad haemorrhage.
‘Thanks very much,’ he said. ‘I'm awfully grateful to you. I feel pounds better.’
At that moment the glass door opened, and Brangwyn came out on to the roof.
‘Well, Murchison?’ he said, ‘Feeling better?’
‘Yes, sir, pounds better, thanks very much.’
Brangwyn looked at Ursula, and smiled. She coloured up, and her eyes dropped.
‘I'm going out,’ she said. ‘I've got some shopping to do,’ and she vanished through the glass door.
‘Is it wise for her to go alone?’ asked Murchison.
‘No, by jove, Murchison, it isn't.’
And Brangwyn vanished precipitately on the heels of his sister, leaving Murchison alone to his meditations.