I had never thought of the bungalow as lonely. It was separated from The Green Man by only thirty yards of straggling roses and lawn and all the showy annuals which you find in a pub garden. Its other side faced a cart track beyond which was an abandoned yard, grass and nettles growing through the paving, where former stables and a half-roofless coach house formed an L-shaped block.

I was sitting up doing accounts in the kitchen, because the light was better. In the other room the lamp was so placed that you could only see to read or write in bed. It was after twelve, and a man coming down from the hills would not have seen another lit curtain for miles.

I don’t think he knocked. He probably leant on the back-door and its latch at the same time, and both opened. His clothes were torn and he was plastered with dried mud. His hair was hanging over his eyes and matted with filth. Because it was fair and lank it looked all the more dishevelled and pathetic, like the forelock of a dun horse which has pitched on its head in the mud and got to its feet, without dignity or sense of direction but still game.

About his eyes there was nothing at all pathetic. Within the tangle they reflected the light or, perhaps, projected it. As he rose, very wobbly, from the kitchen floor, I had the impression of a desperate string of muscles carrying about a brain which could no longer give a sensible order but wouldn’t stop issuing them. He reminded me of a very busy man with a bad attack of malaria.

I shut the door and eased him into a chair. I then saw that skin as well as clothes had been ripped. He was oozing blood from long, shallow scratches; it was that rather than mud which had matted his hair. He stretched out his arm on the kitchen table and rested his head on it. When he looked up at me from that angle, his eyes were even more disturbing. I thought he muttered:

‘I want a woman.’

A normal enough remark in private among friends. But as an explanation to a complete stranger of one’s arrival it was a danger signal. My immediate reaction was to wonder if he would stay quiet while I went over to the pub to telephone a doctor or the police. Only a journey of thirty yards which was never taken. Later on, I was often to think of that.

When he repeated himself in a higher voice, it was clear that he had actually said:

‘I want my woman.’

The ‘my’ made a difference that any barman would recognise. If a customer mumbled after his second whisky ‘I want a woman’ you would give him a likely address and get rid of him; but if he said ‘I want my woman’ you would expect the matrimonial confidences which cartoonists insist are frequent—though in fact, due to this country’s licensing hours, a barman is seldom long enough alone with one customer.

‘Who has taken her?’ I asked, hoping that he would reveal enough of his trouble for me to begin to decide what I ought to do.

‘Nobody.’

‘How did you get here?’

‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘Are you sure she exists? As a person, I mean.’

That was hurrying it a little; but one cannot be expected to have the patience of a psychiatrist. However, he gave to my remark a second or two of whatever he could manage in the way of connected thought.

‘I think she must,’ he said. ‘If she did not, what would I have done it for?’

‘Done what?’

‘Run here. To you.’

‘But she is where you came from,’ I answered very positively, afraid that he might have convinced himself that she was, for example, in my bedroom.

‘She is? Why do you think so?’

‘You couldn’t know where you did come from unless she was there,’ I said, entering far too boldly and irrevocably into his world of obsession. ‘So I don’t suppose anything has happened to her.’

‘Happened to her? Of course it hasn’t! Not to her!’ he exclaimed in a voice which was suddenly shrill and clear.

The upward jerk of his head disturbed his balance—his physical balance, I mean—and I just caught him as he toppled over on to the floor. That eased for the moment the question of what I ought to do. Some elementary first-aid was urgent.

I brought him round with whisky and warm milk, which was all I had in the bungalow since I took my meals over at The Green Man. Then I helped him to undress, sponged and disinfected the scratches and put him in my bed with all the blankets I could find on top of him—a precaution though he showed no sign of shock, only of exhaustion and some inner excitement. He was thin, but sinewy as a bird’s leg. I remember noticing his very openwork undervest, a complicated cat’s cradle of woven string. It suggested that he had brought it through the advertisement columns of some health magazine.

I hung up his tweed suit to await next morning a clothes brush and a sewing machine, turned out the bedroom light and returned to the kitchen to draw breath. My visitor had dropped off to sleep, and there was no urgent need to make a nuisance of myself to hard-working police and ambulance men unless he became violent. Once off the subject of his woman he showed no sign of aberration, thanking me with odd formality for my assistance and curling up like a child.

Like a child, too, he offered no further explanation of himself, handing over to me his inert body with complete trust that I would do something about it. I suppose that it was primarily this simplicity which made me feel so responsible for him. He was neither short of money nor suspiciously rich. He had a few pounds in a neat wallet. His name, marked on his clothes with such care that he was either a rather prim bachelor or had a fussy wife, was H. B. Fosworthy.

Ought I to send for a doctor? Well, there was nothing more that a doctor could do for him beyond shoving a needle into him for luck. As an ex-mining engineer I know temporary exhaustion when I see it. I would have liked to wake up Mrs Gorm and get some eggs or whatever she had in the larder. I decided to do so if Mr H. B. Fosworthy could not sleep. Otherwise there was no point in disturbing him till he woke up and started to demand breakfast.

I poured myself a night-cap and tried to make some sense of my lunatic or criminal or deserted husband or whatever the hell he was. I was about to unpack a Lilo and turn in on the kitchen floor when there was a confident knock on the back-door. I said to myself that it was obviously the police and opened up.

The man who entered was very English and certainly not a policeman. At least I unhesitatingly assumed he wasn’t, though aware that my knowledge of plainclothes detectives was entirely drawn from TV and the cinema. He had a manner which nicely combined courtesy with the assurance that everyone else was as reasonable as himself.

‘I hope you will excuse me calling so late,’ he said, ‘but I saw your light on.’

That meant of course that he had either come along the cart track or down from the hills. It was a little suspicious. If he had a clear right to look for my visitor, one would have expected him to follow the road and call with his enquiries at the front of The Green Man. So I pretended to misunderstand him.

‘I’m afraid the pub has shut down for the night. And they haven’t any rooms anyway. Just this bungalow at the bottom of the garden.’

‘Oh, I didn’t want a room. The fact is: I am looking for somebody. And when I saw your light I thought that perhaps I might ask.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘A man. It’s rather a sad case. He gets off by himself sometimes, and that leads to embarrassment. We don’t want to put him under any restraint.’

Still playing for time and hoping to avoid direct questioning, I said that I had been led to believe that mental hospitals in these days could nearly always cure.

‘Well, yes,’ he admitted. ‘But when it is just extreme eccentricity, one hesitates. … You haven’t seen him then?’

‘I thought I heard a noise in the stables some time back,’ I said, with the idea of protecting myself in case this were a genuine enquiry.

‘Do you think anyone would mind if I had a look round?’

‘Well, I don’t. And everyone else is asleep.’

‘I’ll do that then,’ he said.

‘Do you want any help?’

‘No, don’t bother! I’ve disturbed you enough already. Very many thanks.’

I saw the beam of a powerful electric torch thoroughly searching the deserted buildings. Curious to see where he went when he had finished, I slipped out of the bungalow’s front door into the pub garden. From behind the hedge I watched him hesitate about calling on me again, then climb a gate and disappear across the fields.

It reinforced my guess that he had come that way. I wondered why he had firmly refused help, why he was looking for his eccentric friend on foot instead of proceeding by car from village to village and police station to police station. If he had arrived openly, called first at the pub and then walked across the garden to the bungalow with Gorm, I should at once and thankfully have handed over Mr H. B. Fosworthy. As it was, I felt that morning would be soon enough for decision. The man in my bed was certainly peculiar, to put it charitably, but I now had a worrying presentiment that he was also very much afraid. I doubt if I had spotted it earlier.

I had no friends or connections locally. Not many anywhere in England, if it came to that. My practical experience as a mining engineer was extensive, but my qualifications were not. So when I made a small killing in Canadian tin—owing to the generosity of a grateful Board in financing my purchase of shares—I decided to give up a profession in which I could never reach the top and to start a new life in my own country while I was still young enough to be enterprising. I intended to buy an inn and a garage, near a main road but not on it, and develop the pair together. Mine was not a high ambition, but I was confident that I could pull it off. I’m a good mechanic myself and can spot in five minutes whether an employee knows his job. As for catering and comfort, I have lived for fifteen years in camps and hotels and can smell what a customer likes and what he doesn’t.

That was what had brought me to The Green Man. My agents told me it was on the market. I was having a look at the bar takings which were not very big, the available space which could easily be converted into eight bedrooms and baths, and the garage—which did not exist but could well be made from the coach house and stables provided one metalled the hundred yards of cart track.

Being a stranger, therefore, I had nowhere to go for advice and no judgment to rely on but my own. I would have been happier if this emergency had hit me in some camp on the edge of the tundra where one hopes for the visitor who never arrives, rather than in a tame but unfamiliar English hamlet. For the moment it seemed best to continue to lie low and say nothing. So I locked all the doors and windows and went to sleep.

There wasn’t a sound out of Fosworthy. About seven I looked in on him. He was wide awake, lying on his back and watching the ceiling so intently that I followed his eyes to see if there were a mosquito or a leak or something.

He thanked me in precise language, but very warmly, and assured me that there was nothing wrong with him except that he was stiff.

‘I’d better tell you at once that someone was looking for you,’ I said. ‘A close relation, I think.’

‘Not a relation. Dear me, no! A former colleague would be approximately correct.’

‘He seemed to be sure you weren’t far away.’

‘Yes. If my impetus had not carried me half-way over the wire, he would have caught me. He even got a hand on my shoe.’

‘What wire?’ I asked, with some vague mental image of concentration camps or Berlin walls.

‘Two fields up there. On the edge of the downs.’

Then I knew what he was talking about, for I had noticed the formidable hedge and heard from Mrs Gorm why it was there.

Opinions for and against field sports ran strong and very deep in that countryside. The farmer who owned the land between The Green Man and the western slopes of the Mendips objected to fox-hunting. His boundary fence reflected his determination to keep a heartless world out rather than to keep his cattle in. It was a high, double hawthorn hedge, well trimmed and ditched, with two quite unnecessary strands of barbed wire down the middle.

I could understand Fosworthy’s condition on arrival. If his ‘impetus’ had carried him into the hedge—presumably head first—he must have been in it for long minutes trapped and writhing while a more cautious arm felt for him. And all this when he was exhausted after a cross-country run!

‘You got through it?’ I asked, amazed that he wasn’t still helplessly stuck.

‘Yes. And then I saw your light and forced myself to run again.’

The pursuer had never attempted the hedge, for his clothes were not torn. I suppose he trotted along it looking for some break. When he found that there was no way out, he retraced his steps to the upper gate or gap through which they had stumbled, followed the boundary round to the road and at last came down the cart track in search of the lit window which he, too, had noticed.

‘Look here!’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t you be having treatment of some sort?’

‘I don’t think so. The scratches are all very shallow, and I never suffer from infections.’

I gave up that line. In any case the innuendoes of the other man were probably lies. Fosworthy did not seem at all unbalanced in broad daylight.

‘You’re on the run? Some trouble with the police?’

‘I’m a vegetarian,’ he said.

‘What has that got to do with it?’

‘Quite a lot. But it doesn’t matter. I just mentioned the fact to show you that I do not take life if I can help it.’

‘I didn’t mean I thought you were a murderer,’ I assured him. ‘I was just wondering about the law—or, well, politics.’

‘Nothing to do with either,’ he replied. ‘They both avoid essentials.’

‘For example?’

‘Metaphysical animism. What is your religion?’

‘Well, I put myself down on a form as Church of England.’

‘We are not considering the purely sectarian,’ he rebuked me. ‘You are a Christian then?’

‘Naturally.’

‘It’s not particularly natural. But it’s a good start. I think I had better be going now.’

Suppressing yaps of pain, he hauled himself out of the bed and sat on the edge of it.

‘Where to?’

‘I have to see her again. Affinity is surely undeniable. Loving her as I do, she must be ready to love me. Then we could go far away.’

‘Hadn’t you better tell me a little more?’

‘Definition is so often destructive,’ he replied. ‘It may help you to know that to myself I call her Undine.’

I couldn’t care less what he called her. But he produced this sentimental nonsense with so serious an air that it was up to me to show interest. So I asked why.

‘She has blue veins.’

‘Don’t we all?’

‘My good sir, I was not referring to the back of your hand! I meant that her skin is so pellucid that she might, to my eyes and if I may put it so, be the nymph of an enchanted lake. That perfection is indeed the reason why I find myself in your care, for I have recently become convinced—’ he looked at me as if I were an intelligent schoolboy about to be enriched by an eager master ‘—entirely convinced that when our bodies are ethereal we may not distinguish the extremes of physical beauty.’

I replied politely that no doubt he was right.

‘What do you believe happens to you when you dissolve?’ he asked.

That was the first time I heard this word which was to become so detestable.

‘Well, it’s a bit difficult to know, isn’t it?’

‘Then if you suffer from all the absurd anxieties of mankind, I think you had better get out of here,’ he replied with sudden, disturbing return to everyday life. ‘He’ll borrow a dog and be back with it this morning. The dog will track me here, but so long as this bungalow is locked up and I lay a trail, he will assume I hesitated at the door and went off again. The dog cannot tell him that I entered under your charitable roof. That ensures that you will be unmolested. I fear that I have been instrumental in working my friends into a sad state of excitement in which they are quite likely to commit acts of violence that afterwards they would regret.’

I told him patiently that I was a simple, uncomplicated engineer, and that at least he owed it to me to put things clearly.

‘All I’ve got so far,’ I said, ‘is that you are frightened but that it wouldn’t be important if you hadn’t fallen in love with a girl one can see through.’

‘Though crudely objective, that is about it,’ he admitted.

‘But forgive me if I say it seems inadequate.’

‘Love and death? Inadequate?’

‘I’ll see about getting you some breakfast,’ I said, giving up.

‘I don’t want to involve anybody else.’

‘You won’t. I’ll manage without giving your presence away.’

‘And how about this?’ he asked, turning back the sheets. ‘My word, what a mess!’

In my far too hasty Good Samaritan act I had not foreseen the state of sheets and pillow-case. Or rather I had not thought it important. I never suspected that in the morning there would be any reason for secrecy. The linen was nowhere soaked, but of course spotted by far more blood than could be explained by a shaving cut.

He went into a huddle with himself, quite unembarrassed by silent thought, and at last emerged to ask me what I had done with his clothes. When I replied that they were in the cupboard, he hopped inside to have a look.

‘Thank you,’ he said, peering round the open door like a tame crow, eyes bright with his own incomprehensible cleverness. ‘Would you care to give me your hand?’

‘Of course.’

Quick and decisive as a surgeon he drew two scores from my wrist to my knuckles with a savage twig of hawthorn which he had extracted from his coat. I damned his eyes and very nearly called him a sadistic lunatic.

‘It’s for your own protection. Really it is,’ he said with mild surprise.

My exasperated opinion was that he had an obsession with blue veins. He had neatly nicked one of mine. I asked him how the devil he thought I could explain ripping myself twice in a tidy, modern room without so much as a rusty nail in the wall.

‘You found a poor little pussy crawling around with a broken back, and when you tried to put it out of pain…’

‘I don’t put poor little pussies out of pain! I get someone else to do it.’

‘Then you are very muddled on the subject like many other people.’

But the excuse was good, blast him! When I went over to the pub for breakfast, I used the cat on the Gorms—helping it, not putting it out of pain—and explained that the handkerchief with which I had bound up my hand had slipped while I was asleep. Mrs Gorm said that I should have put my coat over the cat’s head, and did an efficient job on me with adhesive dressings.

She believed in a good breakfast and found in me a guest after her own heart. I could hardly secrete fried eggs in my pocket, but bacon, sausages and a slice of ham were easy. Then, getting up from the table, I remembered that Fosworthy was a vegetarian. That beat me. What did vegetarians have for breakfast? There seemed to be nothing but toast and marmalade which was safe. So I packed a pile of that in a paper napkin and surreptitiously picked half a dozen carrots and a cabbage on my way back through the garden.

When I went into the bedroom, I found that he had had a bath. He looked very different. He would have passed as, say, a devoted preparatory schoolmaster in his early forties if his clothes had not been in ribbons. He actually ate the raw carrots and much of the cabbage, neatly shredding them with a pocket knife—proof enough, I should have thought, that human teeth were never meant for such a diet.

I watched him—stared would be a better word—while he performed his conjuring trick of making a cabbage disappear. I could not make him out at all. He had luminous, grey eyes in a thin face of yellowish tan: a complexion which may have been due as much to rabbit food as to sun. The hollow cheeks and remarkable eyes could look mild and intelligent, as now they did, or crazily energetic under stress.

‘About your movements,’ I said. ‘I have finished my business here and I needn’t stay any longer. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.’

He hesitated over this, and repeated that it was his duty to protect me. He pointed out that he still had to lay a trail for the dog.

‘Damn the dog! There isn’t any dog,’ I exclaimed. ‘And unless it’s trained it can’t tell him anything for certain. All we have to bother about is somebody sitting in comfort on the edge of the downs with a pair of field glasses. If you really believe that is possible, I’ll try to smuggle you into the car unobserved.’

Since his coat was unwearable, I gave him a high-necked sweater of mine, and we pinned up the biggest of the rents in his trousers. I felt dubious whether he was in any real danger at all. Still, the fact remained that his imagination had been sufficiently stirred to dive through the solidest hedge in the county of Somerset. Presumably Undine’s husband—as good a theory as another—did not believe in affinities and cabbage.

The odd thing was that the husband had not seemed in the least angry. Not out of breath. Perfect composure. Excellent manners. He could have been a soldier or a local squire. The compact body, the clothes, the close-clipped dark moustache, the ease and intimacy of address were those of a man with his roots deep in the countryside.

I paid my bill at The Green Man and drove off up the road, then turned into the cart track as if I meant to pick up my bag at the bungalow and save myself the trouble of walking across the garden with it. I told Fosworthy to leave by the front door and work his way on hands and knees round the bungalow into the shelter of the little ornamental hedge. He could then reach the garden gate, which I would leave open, and crawl through it under cover of the car without anyone seeing him except the Gorms. As they were busy cleaning up the bar and shortsighted anyway, the risk was small.

It worked. I reversed slowly with Fosworthy crawling alongside until trees covered us from any observer in the fields or on the downs. He got in and sat on the floor.

We had travelled a mile or two towards Cheddar when he started fussing again about that improbable dog. I gave way to him and drove back until we came to a bend where there was a field gate, just out of sight of the entrance to the cart track. This was likely to be the point where the other fellow had hit the road and he might well revisit it before investigating the now empty bungalow. At any rate Fosworthy proposed to leave his scent there. I suggested derisively that he should do it on the gate post. He considered this in long silence, as if it might be an important contribution to modern philosophy, but decided to have a roll on the grass verge instead. He then discovered that he had left his coat behind in the bungalow.

I told him to stay where he was, and not for God’s sake to attract the attention of passing motorists by rolling on the ground as if he were having a fit. I drove back, recovered his coat, rolled it up and chucked it into the boot of the car.

When I was approaching the junction with the road, my other visitor of the night appeared on the edge of the cart track and waved me down. He asked if I would be good enough to give him a lift. Wherever he had been, he could not have seen anything—except of course that I had forgotten some possession at the bungalow and gone back to fetch it. The dog only existed in Fosworthy’s dreams.

‘Have you found your friend?’ I asked.

‘No. It’s quite hopeless. Where are you going now?’

Fosworthy was only just round the corner of the road, on the way to Cheddar; so I replied that I was going to Wells.

‘That will do fine,’ he said, sitting down beside me.

I shot out of the cart track and made a thoroughly dangerous U-turn. For all I knew, Fosworthy might have been inspired to lay a trail by strolling after me. His reactions were incalculable.

‘What have you done to your hand?’ my companion asked.

He seemed to me a less sensitive type than Mrs Gorm or myself, so I gave him the putting-out-of-pain story, saying that the noise in the stables which I had mentioned to him turned out to be an injured cat.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘You should have apologised to it.’

‘I can’t speak cat.’

‘Nor can I, or only a very little,’ he laughed. ‘But when you have to kill, if you calm yourself, you calm the animal. We are all the same.’

There was something vaguely reminiscent of Fosworthy in that remark. Otherwise the man appeared pleasant and normal. He chatted easily of sheep-farming on the Mendips and moorland reclamation, and did not tell me his name. I myself let him know that I had been a mining engineer and added:

‘But it’s a hotel I’m after now.’

I meant only to explain my innocent presence at the bungalow; but, thinking over the conversation, I can see that the little word ‘now’ was possibly unfortunate.

When we reached Wells, he asked me to drop him at the police station. I was sufficiently interested to hang around out of sight and see what he did. As soon as he thought I had driven away, he came out of the station. He might have had time to ask at the desk whether, for example, a pair of gloves had been found, but not for any serious report or enquiry. It was a bit of evidence in favour of Fosworthy’s implication that this was a very private affair—if indeed he had ever said anything so definite.

I was back at the gate where I had left him in twenty minutes altogether. He was not there, nor was he behind a hedge or in any of the ditches. He had vanished. I was not as relieved to lose him as common sense insisted I should be. He had aroused a sort of paternal and exasperated affection. Besides that, I was fascinated by such individuality in a society which seemed to me to be composed of shades of grey—pleasant and restful enough, but lacking the colour of the decidedly un-welfarish world in which I had been let loose ever since my schooldays.

At any rate it was the society for which I was nostalgic, and I continued the search for my future inn. The Green Man would nearly do, but I was in no hurry. I hoped to find something more to my taste, preferably on or just below the Mendips.

Why there? That question turned out to be so difficult to explain convincingly that I must dig down for the motives which at the time of my pub-hunting were largely unconscious and instinctive.

My mother was Welsh and spoke her language with pride whenever she could find anyone to speak it to—which was seldom, since we lived at Bampton on the edge of Exmoor. My father was an agricultural engineer: in fact, a blacksmith who had moved on from horses to tractors.

She was quietly proud of her ancestry, which she traced back to native princes of Wales—romantically, no doubt—and it was on her stories of the West that I was brought up. I say the West because the bardic legends covered the whole of the Roman-Celtic nation which so long endured on both sides of the Bristol Channel.

How can one explain these acquisitions of childhood which penetrate into a man as a cat’s mouse-catching lessons into her kittens? Put it this way! I had a frontier of the imagination which corresponded to the dim but real frontier of Ambrosius and Arthur. My own true country of choice and spirit ran from the Wansdyke to Land’s End—and this though no one could have been more stolid, ruddy and Saxon than my father at his forge.

When I decided on my new profession, it was the Bristol Channel which tempted me. Devon and Cornwall were too full of holidaymakers for my taste. That may sound odd for an innkeeper, but what I wanted—as much emotionally as financially—was trade all the year round. So for me the answer was a Somerset village, not too low-lying, not too near Bristol, not on the coast. And my personal predilection—here comes in mother again—was for the Mendips and Glastonbury. Mysterious Glastonbury, holy to the Celtic Christians and long before. Avalon, the burial place of Arthur. Ynys Witrin, the island fort of glass which guards the Underworld. In all the explanations of that tradition which I have come across, I have never seen mentioned the simplest of all: that Glastonbury does in fact guard the way to the Underworld. Beyond it, to the traveller coming up from the south, are the hollow Mendips, the silence of death and the unknown waters of the caves.

It was the morning of September 3rd when Fosworthy vanished from the roadside. Some ten days later I was staying at Taunton for the week-end. In the hotel lounge I got into conversation with a man of about my own age, evidently somewhat bored and tired and scientifically restoring his spirits by carefully timed measures of vodka. He was drily amusing and very informative. He lived in a village between Wells and Glastonbury and was a consulting psychiatrist.

As so often happens, he was interested by my mining shop, and I by his account of incredible brain experiments going on in Bristol. We decided to share a table at dinner. Dr Dunton then suggested that he had a much better idea for my lonely evening than a movie, and asked me to come along as his guest to a big annual dance at the County Mental Hospital. When I foolishly hesitated, he said that it would educate me, that I ought to see how the other half lived, and so on.

‘This dance does the influential public the hell of a lot of good and doesn’t do the patients any harm,’ he added. ‘There’s no alcohol served, of course, but you can always slip out to the car park where some of us will be delighted to keep you cheerful. That’s why I am staying the night.’

It did not seem too bad a prospect, especially since I was already in an expansive mood.

‘By the way, do you know if they ever had a local patient called Fosworthy?’ I asked.

‘They didn’t,’ he replied. ‘But I sometimes think they ought to have, if you mean our H. Barnabas Fosworthy. How did you run across him?’

The whole episode, at that distance and after dinner, appeared humorous and unlikely; but his question sobered me up instantly. I wished I had never mentioned Fosworthy. He had been so insistent that it might be unhealthy for me to be connected with him. And, after all, there was some evidence that I should be stupid not to fall in with his wishes.

‘It was just that he wrote me a crazy letter about the origin of tin.’

‘Yes, some daft geological theory would be right up his street,’ said Dunton. ‘His chief interest is in primitive religion. All from books, of course!’

‘What does he do?’

‘Nothing. A bachelor, living on a reasonable income of his own. He’s a funny fellow, much liked and much laughed at. When he first came here, he was always agitating against taking life. But then, very oddly, some of the sporting set began to consider him a sort of local prophet, though they didn’t give up their fun. Our countryside is full of the intelligent half-educated.’

‘It should just about suit me then,’ I said.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean chaps from wide, open spaces! It’s the effect of Glastonbury I’m talking about. There’s such a climate of myth and death about the place. Jung and his collective unconscious is a much safer guide than Freud around here, but don’t tell anyone I said so!’

We took a taxi over to the County Hospital. There were rows of expensive cars outside. Inside, the hall was banked with flowers and gaily decorated. Dunton introduced me to a number of doctors and nurses—many of them foreigners who decidedly knew how to dress for the occasion. It was impossible to distinguish visitors from patients. Well, of course it was. I couldn’t imagine why I should have expected straws in the hair.

I danced a bit, for there was an excellent band, and then visited the car park where I was pressed to choose between champagne in a car belonging to a visiting psychiatrist from the Midlands, and Dunton’s bottle of brandy. It was becoming a really outstanding occasion. I hoped that the following year my new hotel would be able to lay on a special dinner beforehand.

I returned to the hall with Dunton, the registrar and the prosperous headshrinker. While we stood watching the floor, my eye was caught by the lovely slim figure of a girl in a gold-and-white evening frock who was dancing a waltz—the more frenzied modern minuets were carefully avoided—with grace and abandon. When her partner brought her round to us, I was still more interested. She had a small head, with very definite but delicate features, set on a long neck. She was, I recognised, what a river nymph ought to look like, cold, exquisite, of tremulous and uncertain boundaries. One had to examine her closely to see why. Her skin was indeed as transparent as water, and the capillaries showed as a blue mist. At that first sight of her I could not decide whether she fascinated me or not. I never could. I always remained an interested neutral. The effect of that marvellous complexion depended on the light. She could appear slightly grotesque or appealingly and tragically fragile.

‘Is that a patient or a guest?’ I asked.

‘A guest,’ said the Registrar. ‘She lives in Bath, I believe. Do you want to meet her?’

‘Not much. She’s too untouchable.’

Since her frock revealed a good half of delightful high breasts, that was an odd adjective: but I well remember using it. I suppose that instinct really does have some validity in the field of sexual attraction.

‘Myself I find blue willow pattern more attractive to eat off,’ Dunton remarked callously. ‘Still, I can imagine the excitement of following the design wherever it led you.’

‘Oh, God! Excuse me!’ the Registrar exclaimed.

A harmless-looking grey-haired chap, whom I would have put down as a male nurse, had just barged his way on to the dance floor and dropped on his knees before her, babbling. She seemed accustomed to it, or else she was wonderfully tactful by nature. She continued to smile at the poor devil without a trace of embarrassment until he was unobtrusively led away.

The Registrar returned to us, a good deal more troubled than she had been.

‘That hardly ever happens,’ he assured us. ‘A charming patient, too! A quite brilliant paranoiac who spends all his time working out the mathematics of a flat, circular universe!’

Dunton’s mind was still on the girl. He wondered whether she lacked a layer of epidermis or had little skin pigmentation. He said she would have to be damned careful to keep out of the sun.

‘The sun!’ exclaimed the Midlands psychiatrist. ‘What the devil has a woman like that to do with sun and beaches and vulgarity? God! Just think of her naked in candlelight!’

He cleared his throat loudly and medically to cover up his most undisciplined comment. I was somewhat shocked. But, after all, I suppose psychiatrists have to let their hair down sometimes like the rest of us. And I suspected that Fosworthy’s one remaining thought when he arrived exhausted at the bungalow might have been much the same. There could not be two such women.

I was too uneasy to enjoy the rest of the party, for it struck me that where one of Fosworthy’s perturbations was, the other might well turn up. In that case I could imagine Dunton introducing me and cheerfully mentioning before I could stop him that I knew Barnabas Fosworthy. Nor did I want to slip away, since something similar might happen in my absence and I should never know anything about it. Misgivings were not far-fetched. My mysterious visitor with the moustache was the type one would be sure to meet at any social function of importance to the county. I was certain that he was not mysterious to anyone but me.

I was therefore very ready to go when the Midlands mind-healer offered us a lift back to the hotel. He seemed rather glum and disappointed in spite of some pretty affectionate dancing with Fosworthy’s Undine. Dunton, however, was inclined to sing madrigals. At breakfast next morning I found him just as pleasant with a headache as without one. He insisted that I should call on him if I were anywhere near his village in the evening after a day’s pub-hunting. I promised to do so.

The Taunton district had not produced anything I liked. The Green Man was still at the top of my list. Before returning to London, I dropped in to check some details of the existing plumbing. Mr Gorm said he had a telephone message for me which he had been hanging on to in case I turned up. He hunted about for the slip of paper and found it among bottles behind the bar.

If I sees Mr Yarrow, would he be so very kind as to call on Mr Smith at 34 Petunia Avenue, Hammersmith.

I did not know a Mr Smith who could conceivably want to see me. Was the message really for me? Yes, Gorm said, but the caller had not known my name. He had just asked for the gentleman who had been staying in the bungalow.

‘So very kind as to’—that was Fosworthy all right. Added proof was that I had never had the time or the occasion to introduce myself. I was relieved to hear that he was all in one piece, though persuading himself that it was necessary to take refuge in the wilds of Hammersmith under an alias. I had felt guilty—when I thought about it at all—at having let him down through no fault of my own.

The following afternoon I drove out to Hammersmith. 34 Petunia Avenue was a small boarding house, self-consciously bright, with a Room and Breakfast notice in the window. The proprietress answered the bell herself, and I asked for Mr Smith.

‘Oh, we are so glad that somebody has called to see him,’ she cried. ‘He hardly ever goes out, you know, and we were getting a little worried about him.’

I assured her that there was nothing to worry about, that when Mr Smith was not in London he lived all alone in the country and perhaps had got set in his ways.

I knocked on his door. When he opened it, his face lit up with relief and gratitude. I cannot think of a time when anyone seemed so pleased to see me. It reinforced my affection for him.

He was no longer agitated. In fact he looked very quiet and miserable. He was thinner than ever, and his cheeks alarmingly hollow. I said I was afraid he had been allowing his imagination to get out of hand.

‘Bless me, no!’ he replied. ‘But I have had nothing much to eat since I last saw you. I had just enough to pay for my first week here, and then no money at all.’

I reckoned—having been flat broke in my time—that I could have carried on for a couple of weeks on boarding-house breakfasts without showing signs of starvation; but then I remembered his diet.

‘They are most obliging in falling in with my wishes,’ he told me. ‘They give me two dainty rolls and a plate of lettuce every morning, but of course it is not enough.’

I offered to go out at once and buy some nut cutlets or whatever he fancied, if he knew of a shop in the neighbourhood where I could get them.

‘I cannot understand why it should be thought that there is something recondite about vegetarianism,’ he said with a flash of spirit. ‘A brown loaf and a pot of honey would do excellently.’

‘And some milk?’

‘I have an aversion to London milk. Or, to be fair, the small jug I am given with my breakfast is somewhat tasteless. A bottle of stout—if I might trespass so far upon your astonishing kindness.’

I was back in ten minutes with his order. He got outside the whole loaf and three-quarters of a pound of honey. Then he put down a pint of stout with hearty enjoyment. If anyone had asked me, I should have replied automatically that vegetarians did not touch alcohol—probably with some vague thought of pious Hindus.

I was so occupied by the situation in which he had managed to land himself that only now did I have a chance to tell him what had happened when I drove back to the bungalow to recover his coat.

‘I guessed something of the sort,’ he said, ‘and ventured to beg a lift from a passing truck which took me to Reading. I must admit I find hitch-hiking, as I believe it is called, an unwarranted intrusion upon strangers, but they do not seem to mind. From Reading I walked most of the way to Hammersmith and took this room. Then my circumstances became almost desperate, so I risked that telephone call. There was no one else to help and advise me.’

‘But don’t you have friends in London?’ I asked.

‘Very few. And they would not understand.’

I could not see why he was short of cash. I explained—trying not to be patronising—that he could draw a cheque or transfer money to an account in Hammersmith.

‘I should have to give an address,’ he said, ‘and I cannot trust my bank manager not to reveal it. Since I vanished from home without warning, there could be quite innocent enquiries about me apart from the others.’

‘Does this bank manager know your investments?’

‘Yes, of course. I am afraid my life is an open book.’

That was a remarkable statement, if there ever was one.

‘But if you really are in danger, why don’t you go to the police?’

‘It would involve so much. And I could not be a traitor merely because of disagreement with my associates.’

This was utterly sincere: an essential part of his simplicity. I replied that the person or persons from whom he was hiding seemed to be poor judges of character.

‘I am bad at explaining. I get too emotional, you see. I can understand that they mistrust me and are very anxious to ensure my silence. I am in love and cannot help it. I fear I run into strange capers, as Shakespeare said.’

‘I seem to remember that you want to run away with her.’

‘To be with her.’

‘How many times have you met this girl of yours?’

‘Twice.’

If it had just been Fosworthy and the higher mathematician, I should have decided that Undine had a pathological effect on confirmed bachelors in their early forties. But I also remembered the reaction of the psychiatrist. At first sight of her he had sounded ready to leave home, family and profession. And there were Dr Dunton and I, the one finding her as unattractive as if she were painted with woad and the other merely curious.

‘And that’s enough to convince you that some secret or other is worthless?’ I asked.

‘I see you have a gift for distinguishing essentials, my dear Yarrow! An individual cannot be destroyed. Therefore dissolution is a mere inconvenience, though frightening if there is no preparation or apology. But since I have come to know perfection, the life of the flesh appears to me to be of greater value than I suspected. I may have mentioned my doubt that blue veins carry on into the next world.’

‘So long as you believe you see them, it doesn’t seem to me to matter very much,’ I said.

He retorted that solipsism—which seemed to be a textbook term for what I had said—was the resort of the intellectually lazy, and continued to lecture me. As soon as he gave me a chance by drawing breath for the next paragraph, I returned to his practical problem and offered a simple solution.

‘You open an account in Hammersmith or where you wish. I guarantee the initial overdraft, putting up some cover if the Manager wants it. Then you write to the companies whose shares you hold, instructing them to send your dividend warrants to the bank. I don’t see how that can go wrong. It gives you a breather before anyone can trace you.’

‘You would really do this for me?’ he asked.

‘Well, I don’t mind. And meanwhile I’ll pay your bill for the last week and calm down the landlady.’

His private income, he told me, was around £2,000 a year. On that he kept up a considerable library, a comfortable cottage and a cook-housekeeper who came in every morning, served lunch, left his supper in the larder and cleared off home. He had written to her from Reading that he had been called away. He hoped that would prevent her getting anxious about him.

It was about time he sweetened his housekeeper again, so I offered to post, at the other end of London, a cheerful card from him.

‘When you fell into the bungalow that night, how long had you been on the run?’ I asked.

‘Not long. Since about eight o’clock.’

‘Good Lord! I thought it was days.’

‘I never had much of a lead, you see.’

‘You mean, you just kept running with the other chap close behind?’

‘Yes. There was no time to hide or think or anything.’

‘But since eight!’ I exclaimed. ‘It isn’t dark till after nine. You must have passed people and houses and you must have crossed roads, both of you running like hell. It isn’t credible!’

‘I cannot explain any more,’ he said very formally, with the old-fashioned little bow he used. ‘I ask you to accept that, until after dark, we were in a place where there were no strangers.’

‘That reminds me. I still have your coat in the car. I’ll fetch it before I forget.’

One chucks things into the boot and then ceases to notice them. I was sure that his coat was there along with an old wind-breaker, a bit of ground sheet for kneeling on, some oily rags and a torn seat cover. I turned the whole lot out twice. The coat was not there.

I did not mention it to him for fear of arousing all sorts of fantasies which would merely muddle me. I just said that the coat, after all, must be in my flat.

But I knew it wasn’t. My misgivings returned. What about that dance where I had reasonably feared that the dark-moustached country gentleman might turn up? Possibly he had—and then it would have been easy for him to find out how Dunton and I had arrived and where we were staying the night. Plenty of time for a quick examination of my car in the hotel garage. It may not have been locked. The boot certainly was not.

I could not tell how far Fosworthy imagined dogs and dangers, nor make any sense of Undine’s connection with metaphysical animism, whatever that was. It was clear, however, that the man who had chased him to my door now knew that I had taken him in; so it would be assumed that I had asked for explanations, found them of interest to me and concealed his presence—deliberately and for some good reason concealed his presence. We all expect other people to have rational motives, though we know very well that our own acts are half of them due to impulse.

A couple of days later I took Fosworthy along to the bank where I had fixed up the account. He looked very much better. I never knew a man recover so quickly from strain or worry. The next time I called to see him he had gone, leaving no address. Not out of my life. I was sure of that. Sooner or later there would be an appeal to sign his girl’s passport application or some other top secret absurdity. Address: The Meads. Parent’s Nationality: Extramundane. Hair: Long. To hell with it!

I was uneasy about my connection with him and his affairs, but not at all alarmed. If I did some day have to answer police or private enquiries as to what I thought I was up to, my straight explanation would be that I liked him, that I believed I had rescued him and that I felt obscurely responsible. I attached no importance whatever to the mystery which he was suspected of betraying. As likely as not, it would turn out to be a Faery Flag made in Birmingham or a fake Roman bowl which he and his friends had decided was the Holy Grail. On a miniature scale that corner of Somerset was as flush as Southern California with little nests and covens of earnest believers in almost anything.

Shortly afterwards my agents sent me particulars—which were completely misleading—of an inn at Ax-bridge. One look at it from the outside was enough. So I had a free afternoon on my hands with the weather set fine.

Lunching meditatively alone, I considered Fosworthy’s possible movements. He had been on the run from eight, but, if I understood him, had only taken to the open when it was night—say, about ten. Then the place he started from ‘where there were no strangers’ could not be more than twelve miles from The Green Man. Half that was a more likely distance, for he must have been dodging about and changing direction according to the obstacles he came across. Thus his probable starting point was somewhere on the top of the Mendips above Westbury.

I drove up through the Cheddar Gorge—which struck me as being the most coarse and shameless commercialisation of natural beauty in these islands—and then east across the plateau. I knew the roads well already. There were three big, lonely inns, none of them unfortunately in the market, and otherwise nothing but large, windswept farms. It was sparsely inhabited country, but the roads were never far from each other and there was a fair sprinkling of traffic. Fosworthy could easily have found or summoned help in daylight.

For close exploration one needed to be on foot or on a horse. However, I drove idly back and forth across the likely area, searching for a hint of what could have happened. Twice I saw a man on a big grey gelding at some distance from me. When I stopped at a cross-roads with an extensive view and was leaning on a dry-stone wall studying the inch Ordnance Map, he cantered up to me.

‘Are you trying to find anyone in particular?’ he asked.

I hesitated and very probably looked guilty. I ought to have come out boldly with the name of a farm.

‘Not exactly,’ I replied. ‘I was just thinking that if three inns could make money tucked away up here, there might be room for a fourth.’

‘You wouldn’t stand a hope of getting a building licence,’ he said.

‘No, I’m sure I shouldn’t. But it does no harm to speculate.’

The word annoyed him.

‘You people don’t care what you do to us all so long as you can make money.’

The remark was half-suspicious, half-contemptuous. It was also unjust, for if I had ever had a passion for money I could have made plenty of it. I should have liked to mention some of the things which he and his fellow farmers were doing to the country for money. But I saw no point in arguing, so I nodded a good afternoon and cleared off.

As I drove down into Wells, I remembered that Dr Dunton lived only a couple of miles on, along the Glastonbury road, and decided to call on him. It was well after six, so he ought be home from his consulting room.

His eighteenth-century house was immaculate and very satisfying to the eye. Around it was an area of hospitable untidiness. A generously built woman with splendid eyes was washing a dog on the front steps. Four ponies in various stages of undress were being attended by four girls between seven and thirteen. An older boy lay on an uncut lawn, listening to pops on a transistor set and detaching himself pointedly from the feminine obsession with animals.

I introduced myself and apologised for so casual a visit. Mrs Dunton couldn’t care less. I felt that she loved any newcomer so long as he or she could take the family as it was. Dunton had kept his private life completely separate from his profession and avoided any nonsense of competing with Joneses. I suppose that if he had practised at home he could not have lived in so delightfully free and easy a way.

‘He told me about you,’ Mrs Dunton said. ‘He’s round the back somewhere. Pat will show you. And supper is at seven and of course you’ll stay for it.’

Pat, with a pair of plaits which were gloriously clean and golden and a pair of jodhpurs crusted with mud and horsehair, led me round the house and handed me over to her father. He was in a deck chair, a tray of drinks and a book at his side, and he greeted me, like the rest of them, as if I were his next-door neighbour. I told him where I had been in the course of the day, and after a drink and some casual conversation asked:

‘Do you remember saying that this country was full of the intelligent half-educated?’

‘I don’t. But after dinner it’s quite likely.’

‘Have you ever run across the idea of apologising to anything you kill before you kill it?’

‘I’m a psychiatrist, not a surgeon,’ he said.

Vaguely and incompetently I tried to explain what I meant.

‘Now, which of these coons have you been talking to?’ he asked. ‘Aviston-Tresco?’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Our most fashionable vet. And a damned good one.’

‘What does he look like?’

‘Very much the country gentleman. Well-dressed, compact, with a short, dark moustache. I’d put him down as a major in a cavalry regiment, if there were any cavalry regiments.’

‘Has he anything to do with the transparent woman?’

‘Not so far as I know. But I tell you who is a close friend of his—that queer fish Barnabas Fosworthy who gave you his unasked opinion on the origin of tin.’

‘Is there anyone among your vet’s associates who farms on the top of the Mendips and rides a big, grey gelding?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Nothing. He was keeping me under observation this afternoon, and at last rode up to see what I was doing. I mentioned sites for pubs.’

Dunton began to interrogate me in the pleasantest possible way. Where had I been looking for my inns, and since when? What places had I inspected? I answered with a frankness which must have convinced him of my sincerity; but he was a modest man and distrusted his own judgment.

‘I’m going to be indiscreet,’ he said at last. ‘Isn’t your pub-hunting cover for something else?’

‘Good God, no! Why do you think so?’

‘Because you have asked a number of connected questions.’

‘Just curiosity,’ I replied—which was true enough so far as it went. ‘An innkeeper is like a priest. He wants to know all about the parish before he accepts the living.’

‘Neat!’ he smiled. ‘But if you ever feel like telling me all the truth, remember that psychiatrists keep just as many secrets as landlords and priests.’

This was too good a chance to miss. I told him that an impulsive act of mine, which seemed charitable at the time, had involved me with a bunch of believers in something odd, and I wanted to know what they did believe.

‘I’ve had a patient among them and got some of it out of her,’ he said. ‘All life is one and interchanges communication. Death is a mere break in continuity, but it may be momentarily inconvenient or painful. So, if you hand it out, you should express regret. That somehow creates unity with the victim and wipes the slate clean. My patient was obsessed by hunting. In her Rorschach tests she saw antlers, tusks, foxes, heads of imaginary animals. Always death and relics of death.

‘Well, such a creed is attractive to anyone who loves killing birds and beasts. It has some affinity to the sorrow which big-game hunters tell us they feel when they have destroyed a very fine animal. I feel it myself when my daughters send for me to squash a large, very perceptive spider. There’s a moment of fellowship with the creature. The funny thing is that this belief is also a comfort to people who hate killing—like this Fosworthy who won’t and Tom Aviston-Tresco who has to.’

‘You mean that if one were shooting pheasants,’ I asked incredulously, ‘it would be just: Bang, Bang! Sorry, Sorry!?’

‘I don’t know that they would go so far as that,’ he laughed. ‘But I think it potentially dangerous to have no normal respect for death; so I wondered if you were not investigating officially.’

I assured him again that I was not.

‘Anyway it’s all nonsense,’ Dunton went on. ‘This life is exciting, varied and to some lucky people beautiful, and we psychologists make it seem a lot more difficult than it is. As to the next life—if it exists—we don’t know a damned thing about it. Have you ever read Teilhard de Chardin?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t heard of him.’

‘Well, as a Jesuit he was surer of immortality than you or I can be. But the main purpose of life, he thought, was to love, enjoy and seek knowledge. And if a man gave it all he’d got he couldn’t go very far wrong.’

‘So if one of these people fell crazily and romantically in love, it might show up this continuity stuff as a bit doubtful?’

‘At any rate he would find it hard to accept death as a mere momentary inconvenience when it parted him from what he loved,’ Dunton answered.

That very simply explained Fosworthy for me, though not why his friends should have taken his back-sliding so hard.

‘The trouble is that most of them are unmarried or without children and basically lonely,’ Dunton added. ‘Suppose I hadn’t the luck to have all this bouncing, exasperating, dear life around me, then I might sublimate the death wish in dozens of odd ways. But that doesn’t explain the attraction of this nonsense for Tom Aviston-Tresco who has led a most satisfying, full life ever since his wife ran away from him. I suppose that all the killing he must do has given him a neurosis, and he forgets all his healing.’

The Duntons were going into Glastonbury to see a travelling circus and pressed me very warmly to join them; but I did not want to outstay my welcome. I shared their quick meal and pretended that I had business at The Green Man and had reserved a room there.

As soon as I was on the road, I decided that I might as well stay at the inn anyway instead of pointlessly dashing back to London. Although the Gorms did not normally take guests, they were happy to see that the prospective purchaser was still on the hook. And indeed I was. I often day-dream of The Green Man and find myself drawing on the back of an envelope the alterations which I would have made.

About nine o’clock the man I had seen on the grey gelding came into the bar. He recognised me, handsomely asked me to forgive his rudeness in the afternoon and insisted on buying me a drink. He took a polite interest in my plans—patronising, but not more so than was acceptable from someone who knew every inch of his country—and asked me why I particularly wanted the Mendips. I told him that I wished to avoid both the sprawling suburbs of Bristol and the coast. As I have said, I am clumsy at explaining intuitive reasons. I may have sounded as if I were almost contemptuously sparring with him.

‘These hills must once have been a kind of sprawl themselves,’ he said.

I saw what he meant. One was seldom out of sight of the settlements and cemeteries of Neolithic and Bronze Ages breaking the smooth continuity of the grass.

I wondered how their ships got there, and ordered another round of drinks.

‘Up the Bristol Channel with the prevailing south-westerlies behind them,’ he replied, ‘but a lot of them must have come to grief on Hartland. It was easier when men could simply walk from France, following the game.’

‘Not much of a sprawl then,’ I said for something to say. ‘Just a skin tent here and there on the Glassy Hill.’

‘I believe the pundits won’t have Glassy Hill any more,’ he remarked. ‘Glastonbury means the town of Glasteing.’

‘Then why is it called Ynys Witrin in British?’

‘I didn’t know it was. What does it mean?’

‘The Island of Glass. And all the legends insist that it was a hill as well. It marked the way to the world underground.’

‘To wealth, too?’ he asked, looking straight at me with a sort of challenge which I could not then understand.

‘Not unless you obeyed the conditions. Like Orpheus and so forth.’

‘Where do you get all this from?’

‘Out of the collective unconscious,’ I replied, trying a bit of Dunton on him.

I describe this pointless conversation, because it was plain to me later why he had introduced the subject of early inhabitants. However, collective unconscious shut him up, possibly because he did not know what I was talking about—nor did I—but more probably because he did know and shied away from the term.

Very gradually he changed the subject to the question of my future hotel.

‘I think I can give you a good tip,’ he said, ‘which will make up for being short with you this afternoon. If you were to call on the Manager of the Somerset and Dorset Bank in Glastonbury, he could put you in touch with someone who is thinking of selling. The inn is not on the market yet.’

Soon afterwards he left. When the bar closed, I asked Gorm who he was.

‘Mr Alan Jedder,’ he replied. ‘Farms five hundred acres up top. You can see his place from the Twelve Barrows.’

I had been nowhere near the Twelve Barrows when he rode up to me; but earlier in the afternoon I had been prying about among the tracks and earthworks of his country. So I was right in my guess. He had been keeping me under observation.

‘Does he come here often?’

‘Haven’t seen him for donkey’s years.’

Gorm did not know a lot about him except that he was a bachelor, had served in the Navy and belonged to one of the wealthy families of Bristol industrialists.

The bank Jedder had mentioned was Fosworthy’s. I doubted if the Manager had any pub to offer me. The intention was to feel for my financial resources. Since Fosworthy was not dead—the postcards to his housekeeper proved that—he must have found somebody to lend him money.

When I had gone to bed, questions began to answer themselves. How had Jedder known where to find me? Well, he could have telephoned Aviston-Tresco who told him to try The Green Man on the off chance that I might be there. How had he known in the afternoon that I was the man with whom Fosworthy might have shared his secret? Car number, probably.

Till then I had done no thinking about the missing coat, content to be vaguely aware that there was something illogical about it. Of course! The answer struggled up into consciousness and competed with sleep. The coat ought not to have been taken away. In that case I should never have had reason to suspect that my connection with Fosworthy was known. Then why wasn’t it left in the boot? Possible answer: because I could produce it in a court of law. If that was correct, Fosworthy had really been in danger. As a corollary—whatever danger threatened him now threatened me.

In the morning I decided to visit the bank and play it their way. It would be suspicious if I took no action on a hot tip from a knowledgeable acquaintance; also I wanted to get to the bottom of the business. There was a smell of panic in all these hasty arrangements of theirs.

I allowed time for Jedder to telephone—in case he had not got in touch with the Manager overnight—and turned up at the bank at midday. I was shown into the Manager’s office at once. My first impression was of a wispy, pepper-and-salt man with pop eyes. They were as prominent as Persian eyes, but a watery blue instead of deep brown. He was fussily dressed for the manager of a small provincial branch and already in his early fifties, which suggested that his ability was not very marked. A more charitable judgment would be that he enjoyed country life and had no ambition. Like myself, in fact. Still, I could not help feeling that he was vague and ineffective.

With a wet cordiality he discoursed on hotel finance in general and asked me what district I preferred. He knew damned well what district I preferred. I answered curtly that I wanted Glastonbury and the Mendips.

‘If you should change your mind, there will shortly be an executor’s sale of a very profitable free house the other side of Bath,’ he said.

That was a long way from his area, so I asked him how he knew about the sale and how sure he was of it.

He was embarrassed and murmured a lot of verbiage, meant to be imposing, on the subject of the grape-vine between managers. When I pressed him for details of his profitable free house, I was surer than ever that it was a clumsy invention to find out whether I should be tempted and what my resources were. I fear I was deliberately cruel to him as he wriggled in his chair and fiddled with papers.

Dropping his vague proposal as soon as he reasonably could, he told me he knew of a building site near Wookey. A licence had recently fallen in and he believed that the local Bench would transfer it to a respectable hotel proprietor.

‘The site belongs to a Mr H. B. Fosworthy,’ he said, his pale forehead beginning to glisten with sweat. ‘Perhaps you know him?’

‘I do not,’ I replied. ‘But I remember the name. Hadn’t he escaped from a private nursing home or something?’

And I told him how a complete stranger had called at night when I was staying at The Green Man and asked me if I had seen his patient.

I thought that would fix him, and it did. He was out of his depth, uncomfortably dominated by me, and looked as if he would like to creep under his desk. I was exasperated by the silly little man, and left the bank snorting at the incompetence of these anti-Fosworthians. It was only when I had driven half-way back to London that I remembered that Aviston-Tresco had never asked for Fosworthy by name. If he, too, remembered that he hadn’t, I had given myself away. I thoroughly deserved it for bullying instead of meekly listening.

Three days passed—of a dullness that only an exile in London can know. You go to a show or two. You eat in restaurants. You try to get in touch with old friends who are always out or abroad or ask you to lunch the following week. You are eager to talk to anyone who will talk to you.

I had more or less dismissed Fosworthy and his affairs from my mind, deciding that all this agitation was to be expected from a bunch of religious nuts. It was possible that mysterious Avalon or the inexplicable holiness of Glastonbury might have something to do with it, but my best theory was that they had discovered uranium in the old Roman lead mines of the Mendips, that they were too impractical—including the bank manager—to have the faintest notion what to do and that muddled pacifist convictions compelled them to keep quiet. It was an improbable guess, since the hills must have been thoroughly and semi-officially prospected during the uranium boom, but it did account for the facts. They were afraid of me as a mining engineer, not as a future innkeeper.

On the fourth evening I left my depressing furnished flat to go out and buy myself a lonely meal. While I was strolling to the bus stop, I came face to face with Aviston-Tresco. He hailed me very cordially as if I had been an old friend. His manner did not seem forced. The strange circumstances of our only meeting naturally created a sort of intimacy. We did not—officially—know each other’s names. So he introduced himself, and so did I.

I guessed of course that his appearance in my district was no accident, but I was in a mood to hear what he had to say. Whatever his quarrel with Fosworthy, he was presentable and intelligent. Dunton had described him as brilliant in his profession and leading a full life. I think I had the idea of getting the truth out of him as one reasonable and discreet man to another. He gave me the impression that he, too, was very ready to talk.

‘Would you care to come along to my club and have a drink?’ he invited.

I accepted gladly. He told me that his van was parked in the next street, and we walked to it. I thought it odd that he did not use a car to come up to town, but supposed that he had bought some heavy article and was taking it home. He got in first and opened the near door. A whiff of disinfectants, straw and sheep came out. I sat down on a worn, comfortable bucket seat and was painfully pricked by a broken spring or a sliver of metal.

At my exclamation Aviston-Tresco turned round, looked me straight in the eyes with a most kindly expression—not at all the spontaneous consternation that one would expect—and said:

‘I am so sorry this had to happen.’

Right or wrong, memory of the apology instantly connected me to the emergency station. I leapt out of that van and ran round a couple of corners, vanishing into a near-by public lavatory which I had several times found useful. It seemed very unlikely that a really damaging quantity of any drug could be injected by a casual, deep puncture, but a culture of God knows what nastiness could. I vividly remembered two cases of fulminating blood-poisoning in a rain-forest camp, caused by mere scratches. Shutting the door behind me, I pulled out my pocket knife and cut a gash two inches long and half an inch deep across the point of entry—which, since there was no mirror, I could only distinguish by touch.

A broken spring. No doubt there was one. And no doubt some other sharpness, now removed, had been ingeniously attached to it. Whatever was intended to happen to me as a result of sitting down heavily and incautiously in a vet’s working van would have been accepted by me and everyone else as a regrettable accident.

It wasn’t going to happen to me if I could possibly help it. I shot out of the lavatory, waved down a passing car and asked to be taken to the nearest doctor. I probably looked pale and I certainly looked agitated. The long-haired young fellow who was driving did not hesitate. He was not the sort of person who refuses to be involved in unpleasantness. It’s conceivable that his own activities were not always legal. At any rate he was a fortunate choice.

I tried to keep my backside well away from him, but he noticed the stain spreading on my trouser leg.

‘Sit on that, cock!’ he said, folding up a bit of waste. ‘We’ll be there in five minutes. Not to worry!’

He drove me fast into the shabbier part of Westbourne Grove and rang a doctor’s bell. As soon as the door opened, he cleared off discreetly with a cheerful wave.

The doctor was a youngish man and none too cordial. He was, I think, in the middle of his dinner and his surgery was closed. However, he opened the place up promptly enough when he realised that I was in need of first aid, and I was glad to see that it appeared the last word in hygiene and equipment.

‘This is very urgent,’ I told him. ‘I want you to treat me as if I were in danger of anthrax or any other plague you can think of common to animals and men.’

‘Let me mix you a little something first,’ he said.

I snapped at him that I did not need a tranquilliser and was perfectly sane.

‘Imagine I’m a wounded gangster,’ I said, ‘and hurry!’

I pulled down my pants, increasing his alarm, and showed him what I had done to myself.

‘I ripped that open with a pocket knife. It ought to prove to you that I believe the risk to be serious. I want deep disinfecting and whatever antibiotic you think I should have.’

‘We can probably get along with anti-tetanus to start with,’ he said, still doubting me.

‘Don’t need it! I’m a mining engineer and up to date with my injections. You say it, I’ve had it.’

‘How about bubonic plague?’ he asked with a half smile—to find out, I think, whether my reaction would be hysterical or not.

‘It could be. But if it was I should think it’s washed out. I made that gash within two minutes of the puncture.’

He had me face downwards on the operating table at once.

‘Girls on the Underground and so forth,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of such things. But the damage one can do without a syringe is pretty limited if dealt with immediately. And you did, and I’m going to. This will hurt.’

He was right. And the slow injection he gave me afterwards felt like half a pint of liquid.

When I was reclining on side and elbow, very shaky but ‘comfortable’ as they call it, he said:

‘I gather you think this was attempted murder. Shall I call the police for you?’

I gave it some consideration. I could not offer the police any motive or any proof that the prick was not an accident. Aviston-Tresco, a respectable, much esteemed professional man, could show me up as panicking like a hen just because he might once have seemed a little sinister when he called on me in the middle of the night. As for the seat spring or nail or whatever it was, I had no doubt that it was still innocently projecting and that inspection would reveal nothing whatever on its tip.

‘I can’t prove a thing,’ I said.

‘You mentioned diseases common to animals and man. I think that between us we have avoided any risk of anthrax and psittacosis. But hadn’t you better have a course of injections for rabies?’

I replied that I did not believe there was a chance of it. For one thing, an English vet would never have seen a case; for another, there would be headlines, enquiries and quarantines all over the country. And what was the use of giving me a disease which would appear three weeks later?

Assuming that I had not imagined the whole thing, Aviston-Tresco wanted me out of the way because he was at last dead sure that I had learned something I shouldn’t from Fosworthy. Speed was therefore essential. Within a few days anthrax—a wild guess—or some virulent form of septicaemia—more likely—would get me down and finish me promptly. If I never suspected that he had tried to kill me, he could sit tight. If I did come to suspect the car seat and did from my hospital bed accuse him, he was still safe. He could quite openly accept the babblings of high fever with horror and even admit that his far from sterile van might be responsible.

Having stitched up and plastered my backside, this now most friendly young doctor told me to come back for more injections the following day. That turned out to be impossible, and for some time I could only hope that his ministrations had done the trick. Although I was very fully occupied, there were slack hours when imagination was inclined to get out of hand and I would wonder what my temperature was.

I had something to eat—standing up—took a taxi home and limped up the stairs to my first-floor flat, asking myself why I had been so blasted courageous or cowardly in dealing with a scratch. And there, sitting on the steps which led up to the next landing, was Barnabas Fosworthy peacefully reading a book.

He shut it, got up and almost embraced me. With his shy smile, always more effective in inspiring affection than confidence, he whispered mysteriously:

‘I have not been followed.’

I made no comment on that. He wouldn’t have known it if half Somerset had trailed him up the street. I let him in and locked the door.

‘I fear you have done yourself a mischief,’ he said.

I replied that it was just a painful touch of sciatica—for there was no point yet in telling him what had happened—and asked where he had been since he vanished from Hammersmith.

‘Bristol,’ he answered. ‘I came to impart to you that, though remaining in concealment, I have been able to press my suit. I knew you would be so delighted.’

Incredible! I resisted the impulse to point out that the tweed he always wore would not hold a crease.

‘It was received?’

‘With courtesy and charming reserve.’

‘Splendid!’

‘And I shall need your help.’

No doubt he took my broad grin as sympathetic. Actually I had been struck by vague echoes of Bertie Wooster.

‘In what way?’

‘I wondered if you knew a woman of the utmost respectability.’

‘Possibly,’ I replied. ‘But I might be wrong. Why?’

‘Miss Cynthia Carlis has appeared at my hotel. A chaperone is essential. I should not wish a breath of suspicion to rest upon her.’

‘But, for God’s sake, you can have separate rooms!’ I exclaimed. ‘And what makes you think she wants one anyway?’

I received the full broadside of an outraged Fosworthy. My remark was an insult to her. She was the very flower of innocent purity. One had only to look at her. How dared I?

I apologised. I begged him to believe that my view of womanhood had been corrupted by mining camps. A preposterous statement! Mining camps in fact are suspended in an unsophisticated void between cheerful obscenity and an idealism as hopeful as Fosworthy’s own. But he accepted my excuse as plausible, and calmed down.

So I was able to persist with tactful questioning and obtained some account of his doings. He assured me that he had been very cautious, avoiding Undine’s home and friends and waiting for a chance to waylay her in the street. As soon as he succeeded, it was no longer necessary to visit Bath, for she was willing to meet him in Bristol or half-way. Twice she had tea with him. Once he took her to a theatre. Once they had a morning together in the river meadows of the Avon.

‘And did you come directly back by train to London?’

‘Yes, from Bristol, where I said farewell to her. And then very carefully I called on you last night. But you weren’t in.’

It sounded like a child’s reproach.

‘And how did you spend today?’

‘Quietly in my room. I telephoned to her by previous arrangement to tell her that I had arrived and to express my devotion. She replied shortly that she herself was coming to London and that I should book a room for her at my hotel. I blame myself for not reminding her at once that she would be compromised, but I was so overjoyed and she sounded so agitated that I did not. After her arrival this afternoon I wished to see you and confide in you instantly. I was very conscious, however, that I owed it to you to wait until dark.’

Dark! He was hypnotised by words and conventions. As if he could not be followed in the excellent street lighting of London! He probably turned up his coat collar and pulled his hat over his eyes, making himself more conspicuous still.

It was now certain that there really had been an attempt to remove me. The coat alone did not prove beyond doubt that I had received and helped Barnabas Fosworthy; he might have chucked it into the boot of the car himself, rather than into a ditch. Similarly, my indiscretion to the Bank Manager could have an innocent explanation—that I had guessed, by putting two and two together, the name of the man whom Aviston-Tresco had chased through the haunted darkness of the Mendips. But when, on the previous night, Fosworthy had been followed to my address, there was no longer any reason to hesitate.

‘Is Miss Carlis connected with all these former associates of yours?’I asked.

‘No! No!’ he exclaimed. ‘If she were, I could never have risked all this. As it was, I had to be especially careful, since she has a female friend who heard, I fear, my original rejection of our beliefs and was most displeased by it, but she had no reason to guess the identity of the cause of my emotion.’

‘Why shouldn’t your Cynthia have told her?’

‘Because I asked her not to, and she willingly gave me her word.’

Well, I couldn’t complain. He had warned me when he was at Hammersmith that his whole object in life was to be with his enchantress. My only hope was that she felt the affinity nonsense as strongly as he did. But it seemed most unlikely.

‘So this friend of hers is in touch with Aviston-Tresco?’

‘You know his name?’

‘Of course I do,’ I answered impatiently. ‘What I don’t know is why he has it in for you. Didn’t you tell me that when you were struggling through that hedge he got hold of your foot?’

‘For a moment. But I was kicking.’

‘Did he apologise?’

‘No. I am sure he only meant to put me back in con­finement until he got what he wanted from me. How do you know about the Apology?’

‘Poor little pussy-cat, for one thing,’ I replied obscurely.

‘You should show respect for earnestly held beliefs until you know enough to confute them, Yarrow. That is your only fault,’ he said, getting up. ‘But I see you are tired.’

‘What hotel are you staying at?’

‘The Pavilion in Bayswater. But propriety demands that I should spend the night elsewhere. I shall return to Petunia Avenue and make it, in military parlance, my headquarters. Love unconquerable in battle! Doubtless you remember your Sophocles?’

I replied rather sourly—for I felt extremely sore—that I doubted if Roman generals would approve of his tac­tics. He found it necessary to inform me that Sophocles was Greek, and mercifully let it go at that.

Perhaps I should have accompanied him, but by this time I felt unable to move anywhere but bed. I warned him that he really ought to assume that he might be followed, and recommended a few quick changes of the Underground, entering or leaving trains just as the doors were closing. That should do the trick. If he was being tailed, it was, after all, by one or two complete amateurs, not by experienced detectives.

Next morning I felt much better and was able to hobble about more easily. At breakfast I was called up by a woman. She had a pleasant but rather too decided voice.

‘My name is Filk,’ she said. ‘Miss Filk. Dr Dunton advised me to call on you to discuss a very personal matter.’

I replied that I was unfortunately laid up with a touch of sciatica which prevented me from inviting her to lunch, and that I should be delighted if she would come round and have a drink about midday.

There was nothing else I could do—short of saying that I refused to be interviewed except in the presence of police. It was just possible that she did come from Dun­ton, though I doubted it. She might be the patient he had mentioned who had given him half her confidence and was inclined to see little foxes in blots.

Whoever she was, I suspected that she was coming to negotiate on behalf of Aviston-Tresco, with a foot somehow in both camps. In that case I had a chance to convince her that I did not know and was not particu­larly anxious to know why my pub-keeping or supposed prospecting or any other activity was alarming them, and that the Quantocks would suit me just as well as the Mendips for my future hotel.

I then telephoned 34 Petunia Avenue and asked for Mr Smith—partly to satisfy myself that he was all right, partly to see what he knew of Miss Filk. The landlady told me that he had gone away over a week ago, leaving no address. But hadn’t he, I asked, returned last night? No, he hadn’t.

I did not like that at all. I could only hope that Undine had told him not to be a fool and that he had remained at the Pavilion Hotel after all. I called them up. Mr Fosworthy had come in late, paid his bill and left. Was Miss Cynthia Carlis there? Yes, she was. At the mention of her, the male voice from the reception desk at once took on a tone of cordiality, even of enthusiasm. I guessed that there was still another would-be collector of blue willow pattern.

Telephoning for a taxi, I directed the driver to Notting Hill underground station which was not far from the Pavilion. I kept an eye on the back window and made sure that no car was following. I also waited in the station and watched out for loiterers. As soon as I was certain that no one was taking any interest in my movements, I limped to the hotel.

The porter was helpful. Mr Fosworthy had left on foot, carrying the small bag which was his only luggage. He had, I gathered, tipped generously, asking the porter to take the greatest care of Miss Carlis and saying that he would look in after breakfast to see how she was. He had not yet arrived.

This demanded immediate action. The disappearance of Fosworthy was a plain fact, as Aviston-Tresco’s attempt on me was not. The police could be called in and told the little I knew. I wish to God that I had done so then and there, but I thought it best to find out first what Cynthia Carlis had to say.

I sent up my name with a message that I was an old friend of Barnabas Fosworthy and would much like a word with her in the lounge. She came down almost at once—not in the least bothered about Fosworthy but evidently eager to gossip with someone who knew him.

To my eyes she looked a lot less fragile and more nor­mal than at the hospital dance, for she was dressed in an expensive and countrified sweater with a rolled neck. One was only conscious of very transparent, white skin on her forehead and below her ears, and there was little temptation for the middle-aged to speculate on the extent of the network. She was also rather older than I had thought, though well under thirty.

I introduced myself and made it sound as if I had known her Barnabas from childhood. Then I told her, to see how she would react, that he had called on me the previous night and asked me if I knew of a respectable chaperone.

‘Oh, isn’t that like him!’ she exclaimed with a laugh which I found artificial. ‘He’s such an absurd darling! Do you know that he actually left for another hotel?’

I replied that I did not. I had no intention of mention­ing his disappearance until I knew how and where she entered the story. For the moment Petunia Avenue and Mr Smith were no business of hers. So I merely asked what time she expected him to return.

‘He said he would be here at half past nine precisely,’ she replied. ‘But you know his habit of looking round corners to see what is following him. I expect that is just what he’s doing and that he has lost himself.’

‘Did you always find him like that?’ I asked.

‘Losing himself? Well, he’s so absent-minded.’

‘I meant the looking round corners.’

‘Yes, except the first time we were out together. I thought it was just one of his peculiarities—things that make him different and rather attractive.’

‘Nothing else?’

She hesitated and admitted:

‘Well, there was a friend of mine whom neither of us much wanted to see.’

Obviously innocent! She knew nothing and was not being used. So I decided to go on playing the part of old and trusted friend and find out what the devil she was up to. I did not for a moment believe that she was in love with Fosworthy. If she had been, she would have man­aged to convince him that his duty was to stay with her, separate rooms or not, instead of treating his mannerisms as a joke.

I ordered some drinks while we waited for the lover who was not going to arrive, and let her interrogate me about his character and background. She seemed the sort of woman who is incurious about the depth of our earthy roots, content to loiter through life in a compli­cated surface daze. Well, if appearance reflects character, I suppose that is about all one could expect from a water nymph: weakness.

Yet, fluttery and irresponsible though I found her, I could not forget the kindness and self-possession with which she had treated the poor, old, flat-earth mathema­tician. The fact was that her graceful body looked so sensitive and her manners were so automatically good that they covered up her lack of intelligence. In a way she represented, like Fosworthy, a continuance of the best provincial society of the turn of the century.

I wonder how far she realised that Fosworthy’s own manners concealed an insanity of love. She may have seen their relationship as sweetly sentimental—like that, say, between some college student and her much older tutor. She possibly went so far as to speculate about a gentle, physical affair, but had no intention of having one.

‘I like Barnabas very much and I am so sorry for him,’ she said.

‘How did you first come across him?’

‘At a meeting of the Arimathaeans in Bath.’

She told me about it. Fosworthy had insisted on holding the floor. It seemed to be his habit to appear as a minority of one. He was deferred to. I doubt if I ever appreciated his importance as a local oracle. It accounted for the fury of his disciples when he denied his own teachings.

This society, however, had nothing to do with his sect; it was semi-literary with a dash of archaeology, harmlessly and romantically occupying itself with the real and mythical history of Bath and the Mendips: Arthur and Avalon, of course, the supernatural discovery of the plans of Glastonbury Abbey and so forth.

Fosworthy had been disrespectful about the Christmas-flowering thorn supposedly sprung from the staff of Joseph of Arimathaea. He suggested that this variety had been among the first shrubs to colonise the tundra after the retreat of the ice, and still required cold to flower. He became excited and eloquent on the marvel of this thorn to palaeolithic man and emphasised the vast antiquity of folk memory.

Undine’s account was naturally incoherent; but that she could repeat the subject matter at all showed that then and there she had been oddly impressed by Fosworthy. Well, of course she had. He had never taken his adoring eyes off her. When they had their first tête-à-tête she had been fascinated by his gentle, ceremonious devotion. His eccentricity did not alarm her. She accepted him as the conventional, comic figure of absent-minded professor.

‘Your friend is also interested in primitive religion?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know what she is interested in,’ Undine replied sharply, ‘besides breeding dogs and killing animals or not killing them or something. Men are so absurd. Women, I mean.’

The slip of the tongue passed right over my head at the time. But it seemed a good moment to get her to talk about herself instead of Fosworthy.

‘It was sweet of you to come to London and see him,’ I said. ‘What made you decide so suddenly?’

‘Because I shall do what I like.’

I apologised. I assured her that it was only my personal affection for Barnabas which had made me put so impertinent a question.

‘It wasn’t impertinent at all,’ she answered graciously. ‘You have every right to ask. It was someone else I was thinking of.’

‘This friend of yours?’

‘How did you guess? Yes, she was following me and she saw me say good-bye to Barnabas on Bristol station. And then we had a row. So when Barnabas telephoned me yesterday, I decided I would come to London.’

‘Have you told her where he was staying?’

‘No! She doesn’t know where I am either,’ she added with a shade of satisfaction.

Well, if she didn’t, she soon would; but that was no business of mine. I had got all I wanted, so I pleaded a previous appointment which prevented me waiting any longer for Barnabas and said an affectionate good-bye as gallantly as I could manage.

My intention now was to see this Miss Filk and insist on her accompanying me to the nearest police station. I arrived back at my flat with quarter of an hour in hand and limped up to the flat roof of the building from which one had an extensive view of my own street and two side streets. I wanted to make certain that she was alone and that no monkey business was being planned under cover of her visit.

I spotted the probable Miss Filk when she was fifty yards away on the opposite pavement. She was dressed in a black town suit, smart but severe, with a man’s cravat round her throat, and wearing a simple felt hat. Pacing alongside her on a slack lead was a magnificent black Doberman—a very effective chaperone when committing oneself to the flat of a stranger. It occurred to me that I should have to be pretty tactful if I meant to detain her against her will.

As soon as I saw her examine the street numbers and wait to cross the road, I hopped fast down the stairs with the aid of the banisters and was inside my front door before she rang. She was in her late thirties, taller than I had thought and authoritative. She struck me as a woman of experience with whom it might be possible to talk frankly without bringing police—or Dobermans—too crudely into the picture.

I supplied her with sherry and cigarettes—she puffed continuously and aggressively—and admired the dog. She said that she bred them. I then expressed my admiration of Dr Dunton, though by now I was sure that she had only used his name as a passport. Her response was curt, so I left a pause for her to open up.

‘A Mr Fosworthy,’ she said, ‘has been making himself a nuisance to my ward.’

So that was it. The wardship was rather out of my depth. I could, however, understand it when I remembered the devastating effect which Cynthia Carlis had on some of my sex. It was more than likely that in early youth one or two of her contemporaries had been far too brutal. And then there were the rest of us who stared at her with an almost insulting absence of desire. She must have found men cruel and unaccountable. Even more convincing than anything else was the fact that Fosworthy, being Fosworthy, would of course have set his guileless heart on a girl who was unattainable.

He had had, from his point of view, a damnable stroke of bad luck, caught out by his innocence not by any carelessness. His Undine ought to have foreseen that Miss Filk was likely to become suspicious about her mysterious absences. Perhaps she did foresee it, didn’t care, even welcomed it. After all, she could not know that the looking round corners was deadly serious.

And so Miss Filk, after jealously trailing Undine to Bristol station and skulking behind a barrow load of fish boxes or racing pigeons or whatever was handy, had been doubly shocked to find that her secret rival was a man and that the man was the missing Fosworthy. I take it that her first action was to warn Aviston-Tresco or some other associate that she had sighted him on the London train, and that later in the day she had such a flaming row with her ‘ward’ that the girl walked out on her.

Even so Fosworthy’s trail could never have been recovered if they had not been so obsessed by his connection with me. The gaps were now easy to fill in. Somebody had obtained my address, cautiously watched my flat and spotted Fosworthy’s first visit. That gave time for Aviston-Tresco to arrange the front seat of his van and to organise whatever simple trick would be enough to fool Fosworthy. It was a hundred to one that after his second visit to me he had again been put out of circulation.

‘Miss Filk, I’m not going to pretend to you,’ I said. ‘I am sure you are well aware of the circumstances in which I met Mr Fosworthy.’

‘He is quite mad, you know.’

‘He is certainly eccentric when he talks about your ward. Otherwise I find him reliable for so quixotic a person.’

‘You believe what he has told you?’

‘He hasn’t told me anything except that he suddenly found his feeling for Miss Carlis getting in the way of some personal creed of his.’

It was only then that I noticed an unsteady brilliance in her eyes. I warned myself that I had better be careful. Whether she had come to negotiate or not, she was in a savage temper and more likely to blow up than to listen.

‘Then why have you financed him?’

‘I have not exactly financed him. I lent him money because he was obviously in trouble and I couldn’t help liking him. I am very sorry that he can’t keep away from your ward, but it was not my primary intention to make things easier for him.’

‘I am quite sure it was not.’

She said this slowly and contemptuously, and I thought it was time to give her something which could be passed back.

‘I’m a working mining engineer, Miss Filk,’ I assured her, ‘and I know the geology of the Mendips and what one can or can’t expect to find there without being told by Mr Fosworthy. Really you can leave him out of it.’

As I see now, I could not have said anything worse. It looked as if I had learned all that Fosworthy could betray, and was making a futile attempt to protect him by admitting it.

There was an awkward pause, so I leaned forward to scratch the ears of the supercilious dog. I have a faint recollection of raising my head in alarm. Probably the blow was already on its way downwards.

The next thing I knew was that I lay on the floor of a van with a pillow under my head. To my newly opened eyes it seemed to be quite dark. This worried me until, through the back window, I saw lights flashing past. I stayed quiet, except for slightly shaking my head to see that it belonged to me.

It was a fair guess that I had been coshed by Miss Filk. Never having been coshed before, I could not tell how efficiently she had done it. I felt more drowsy than ill so that I knew she could not have hit me hard enough to lay me out for more than a few minutes. Without actually knowing what happened, I assume that Miss Filk had come provided with a syringe to keep me quiet. As a breeder of sleek, expensive Dobermans she was probably quite accustomed to using it.

How they carried me out of my flat after Miss Filk had telephoned that she had got me I do not know, but again it is not difficult to guess. I lived only one floor up. and most of the other tenants were out all day at their places of business. No one was likely to see my removal from flat to front door. For the short passage from front door to van—well, it wouldn’t be beyond Aviston-Tresco’s powers to provide an official-looking stretcher and a couple of St. John’s Ambulance caps.

My wrists and ankles were firmly tied. I was not gagged, but it was pointless to start yelling and be forcibly suppressed when I could not be clearly heard from any passing car. On the other side of the van was a bundle, snoring. I could just make out the untidy mass of fair hair at one end. I regarded the drugged Fosworthy with mixed feelings. I was sorry for him. I was glad of his companionship. But I was certain that if he could make matters worse, he would.

I must have dozed off again, for the next thing I remember is Fosworthy sitting up and looking at me. He had something soft stuffed into his mouth and held in place by a scarf tied behind his neck. He made a complicated, indignant gesture with his head, which I took as meaning that this was an outrage and that he would declare my absolute innocence. Soon afterwards the van bumped along a field track or unmetalled lane. Fosworthy evidently recognised the uneven motion, for he nodded to me as much as to say that he knew where we were. I can’t see what comfort he got from it.

We stopped, all lights off, on a concrete yard outside a farm building. Aviston-Tresco and Jedder got down from the front seats and opened up the van. I could dimly make out some water troughs and a clamp of silage. I had the impression of a lonely barn in some outlying part of the estate.

‘I do not want to cause you unnecessary pain,’ Aviston-Tresco said to me, ‘but if you shout I shall gag you at once.’

I said nothing. Anyway I doubted if there were a living soul within earshot. The south-west wind carried the softness of the Bristol Channel, and I could sense that it was sweeping over bare downland without trees or buildings, for it was steady as at sea and silent except for the whispering through grass. Everything suggested that we were on the Mendips, almost certainly on some desolate hill pasture of Jedder’s farm.

The pair of them carried me in, dropped me gently on a hard floor and went back for Fosworthy. As soon as he, too, was safely inside the building, Jedder locked the door and switched on a light.

The place appeared to have been fairly recently converted from an old stone barn. There were glass lights in the roof, but no windows. The double door through which we had come was new and fitted closely. There was a second door—an ordinary house door—opposite. Along one of the side walls were piled bales of hay. The other was occupied by old, disintegrating cow stalls. On a floor of rolled rubble were some agricultural implements, an aluminium ladder, a disused tractor, a discarded dynamo and bits and pieces from former days when horses had been used on the farm.

Yet the barn was plainly for more than shelter and storage, since there were two twelve-volt batteries to provide light, and an iron stove with a stack of wood alongside it. As I learned afterwards, Jedder’s farm-hands were aware that he and his friends visited the place for picnics or meetings; but eccentricities were none of their business so long as their wages were paid.

When Fosworthy’s gag was out, he let loose his indignation as if Aviston-Tresco and Jedder were a couple of impudent trespassers. He showed not a sign of fear, though whether that was due to his beliefs or his anger at being humiliated I could not tell.

‘I protest against your treatment of my generous and kindly friend, which is intolerable,’ he declared. ‘The position in which he finds himself is entirely my fault.’

‘It is,’ said Aviston-Tresco.

‘But I have told him nothing! I merely explained to him, as I have to you, that I consider a number of our basic tenets need restating.’

He might have been a sacked commissar defending himself before his interrogator—except that I doubt if any political fanatic could be so romantically self-sufficient.

‘You threatened us,’ Jedder reminded him.

‘Certainly I threatened you! I said that if you refused to listen to me I should make the whole of our controversy public.’

They were of the same height and roughly of the same colouring, though Jedder must have weighed half as much again. The two crests of fair hair jerked at each other.

‘And then you went straight to Yarrow.’

‘I had never seen him before in my life.’

‘Frankly, Barnabas, I don’t know,’ Aviston-Tresco said. ‘But when you did talk to him he realised that what you were proclaiming in your usual excitable way could be worth a lot of money to a man looking for a hotel site.’

That absolutely beat me, for I had been certain that they distrusted me as a former mining engineer. It was beyond imagination that Fosworthy could know anything of interest to the catering industry except a recipe for dandelion leaf sauce.

‘I give you my word that I have told him no more than I had to in order that he should understand my intellectual predicament,’ Fosworthy replied in a tone which suggested that his word could not possibly be disbelieved.

I must have smiled. He was an incredible man. What he said was quite true, but his intellectual predicament was the last thing I took seriously.

‘Then why did he lend you money?’

‘Because I had to escape. I have now a great deal to live for.’

‘I had no intention of violence, only of confining you again until you came to your senses and we could decide what to do with you. But just look what your emotional idiocy has landed us in now!’ Aviston-Tresco exclaimed. ‘Yarrow must dissolve and you, my poor, dear Barnabas, as well.’

He sounded exasperated. Nothing more than exasperated. That revealed to me more clearly than any of Dunton’s or Fosworthy’s attempts at explanation how sincerely these people believed that death was an unimportant incident. Aviston-Tresco’s manner did not belong to anything so serious as murder. It was that, say, of a creditor telling us that we were such incompetent fools that there was nothing left for him to do but to take legal proceedings.

‘What earthly chance do you think you have of getting away with it?’ I asked from the floor. ‘You must have left enough clues for the stupidest of policemen.’

‘They will not find any motive for your dissolution, Mr Yarrow, or any body either. The only clue is a car with false number plates from which you were transferred to my van.’

I kept my mouth shut about the doctor who stitched me up, because it seemed unfair to set these lunatics on him. For the same reason I did not mention Dunton. In any case neither of them would be surprised or suspicious if they never saw me again. But if I had realised that I was within seconds of what they chose to call dissolution, I should have shouted at him that he was not as safe as he thought.

‘Again I tell you that I am very sorry,’ he said with a smile that was an obscenity in his gentleness and confidence.

‘Again?’ Jedder asked.

‘He is doomed already. But we won’t wait for it.’

‘When? Why?’

Aviston-Tresco was embarrassed and evidently did not know what to reply. It was an eye-opener that he had never told Jedder—and that went for Miss Filk too—of his first attempt on me.

The order of events became a little clearer. What he had hoped was that after the prick I would accompany him to his club for a drink and go home unsuspecting. The fact that I knew all about his Apology badly shook him. He panicked. He had never tried to watch my movements when I bolted for that public lavatory and had cleared out as fast as he could. It was not surprising. Hundreds of animals he had kindly and graciously put out of pain, but this was the first human being.

Then he had to improvise a plan for silencing me before I was removed to hospital. I might also go to the police. No doubt Miss Filk had been warned to take no action if I showed the slightest sign of having set a trap. But, by and large, he was confident that I was a man of independent character who would be most unwilling to make accusations without a scrap of sensible evidence.

It did not look as if he had even examined my backside in the hurry of kidnapping me. If he had, he must have spotted that I had never cleaned and sewed up the wound myself. He took the sciatica which Miss Filk must have reported as the beginning of the end.

While I lay tied up, wondering whether my dissolution would be by syringe, knife or what, all this raced through my head, all logically following from the fact that Aviston-Tresco had deceived his associates. I would never claim to have thought it out. My analysis was more like a continuity of street scenes passing before the eyes.

Alan Jedder did not like Aviston-Tresco’s admission at all, for he realised that there might be other evidence lying about to be picked up besides false number plates.

‘You’d better tell me the whole story,’ he said. ‘They will be all right here.’

The pair went through the door into the next room or compartment, and I could faintly hear their voices. Jedder’s confidence that I would be ‘all right’ was justified. I am always inclined to accept a situation which I cannot alter, and the aftermath of the sedative made me more so than usual.

But one could not bind Fosworthy’s flame with ropes. So long as this world held Undine, he was not prepared to be dissolved into another. He rolled over on to his side and started to propel himself across the floor like the non-existent broken-backed pussy. He wriggled his shoulders up against an old plough-share which was leaning by the wall and began to saw his wrists back and forth. I was terrified lest he should knock it over; but for once he had single-minded control of his clumsiness. Then he untied his feet and released me.

We were locked in and Jedder had pocketed the key of the outer door, so there was nothing for it but violence. I grabbed Aviston-Tresco’s powerful electric torch, which he had obligingly left on the bonnet of the tractor together with his hat and a sinister instrument bag, and picked up a pitchfork with a broken handle. It was a frightening weapon, for the two prongs had rusted away to fine points. A man would have to have his anti-tetanus injections up to date after a poke in the belly with those.

‘I apprehend that you mean to take life,’ Fosworthy whispered.

‘I shall duly apologise,’ I said.

But I was far from happy about it. The Law allows one to use reasonable force. How much was reasonable for a person who could establish that he was kidnapped, but might have difficulty in proving that his life had ever been in danger?

Fosworthy told me that there was another way out of the building, earnestly explaining that he considered his first duty must be to protect me. I replied patiently that I wholly agreed and that we should run for the nearest police station as fast as we could.

‘I greatly fear there will be no chance of that as yet,’ he said. ‘Can you hold the door for a minute or two?’

I doubted it. My own unaided efforts, while still dopy from Miss Filk’s cosh and a sedative, were not enough to hold the door against two healthy men. Any attempt to drag something heavy across the floor would be heard. However, there was always the pitchfork.

Fosworthy started to lift bales of hay from the centre of the stack against the wall. With his height and long arms, he had just the build for the job, and he worked like a demon. In less than a minute he had made a considerable bay, and was down to the two bottom layers. The bales were a helpful protection for the door. I was silently building them into a wall when the main stack collapsed inwards with thuds which were loud enough to hear.

Aviston-Tresco and Jedder at once charged the door. My wall of hay was little use. There was nothing solid I could get my feet against, and no doubt I instinctively spared the muscles of my left thigh. Meanwhile Fosworthy had cleared away the fallen bales and was heaving at the bottom row.

The door gradually opened. Aviston-Tresco got his right arm and shoulder through, and there was nothing for it but the pitchfork. I was savage enough to hope that it had last been used for shifting manure. It went in at his wrist, the tine reaching as far as the elbow. I tried to withdraw it and twisted the curved tine in the process. His scream appalled me. I wouldn’t have thought that such a noise could come from a man’s throat.

I slammed the door shut. Fosworthy shouted to me to come over quick. He had cleared the floor and opened a thick, wooden hatch set in rough brickwork. I saw him hang on to the rim of the shaft and drop. The hole was immediately flooded with light. I dashed across to it and let go into space. Fosworthy tried to break my fall, with the result that we were both shaken and bruised. Jedder, yards behind me, did not attempt to follow. He slammed the hatch shut.

The passage into which we had crashed was a gallery driven through earth and loose limestone, shored in a very amateurish way. To my professional eye the roof looked most unsafe. The gallery extended for over thirty feet, lit by two naked bulbs, and ended at a steep, nearly vertical slope which was clearly not artificial though the stone had been hacked about to remove projections. Down this led a flight of stairs—obviously a brow or companion ladder from a ship—with stout brass-mounted steps and a teak hand-rail.

We were now in a small, irregular cavern. It was partly furnished with a table and a few chairs. Along the wall was a rack on which were hanging some sheepskin coats, fleece lined. There were even a mirror and a washbasin, showing that this was a sort of cloakroom or changing-room. In a horizontal cleft was a range of storage batteries for the light. Since they must have been charged from the surface, it was plain that the dynamo and tractor in the barn were not so unserviceable as they had been made to appear.

‘I must hope that the cry was due to surprise rather than extreme pain,’ Fosworthy said, breaking the silence. ‘I trust this is all worth the trouble. If only you could see her!’

One could hardly imagine a remark less appropriate to the situation. But I had to take him as he was. I answered that I had seen her, that there couldn’t be two.

‘Where?’ he asked eagerly. ‘What did you think?’

I shrank instinctively from telling him of my visit to the Pavilion and of Miss Filk. He would be overcome by fear for his Cynthia and remorse that his innocent ecstasy on Bristol station had betrayed me. She and I must have been the only close friends left who returned his affection—one of us with complete, if exasperated, sincerity; the other with, at any rate, pity. So I merely mentioned Dr Dunton and the dance.

He said that Dunton was an excellent fellow, though limited, very limited—which certainly meant that the doctor had at some time tried to preach common sense to him.

‘And now, would you mind telling me where we are?’

‘We are in the largest cavern of the Mendips,’ he said. ‘This is the secret.’

‘But why?’

He did not answer. They seemed to be as unaccountable as twelve-year-olds. All right, a private cave! So what? It was under Jedder’s land, and nobody could compel him to repeat the vulgarities of Cheddar if he didn’t want to.

‘And how do we get out?’

‘I fear I had to take a too sudden decision,’ Fosworthy replied. ‘That question did occur to me, only to be dismissed as momentarily irrelevant.’

‘You mean, we can’t get out except by the way we came in?’

‘I would not put it as strongly as that, but it might turn out to be so.’

‘Then I think we had better fight our way out now, while only Jedder is up top.’

‘He will, I am sure, have replaced the bales of hay. And in any case we cannot reach the hatch without a ladder.’

So that was what the aluminium ladder in the barn was for!

‘But in that case we are trapped.’

‘We may indeed have to endure hunger,’ Fosworthy remarked mildly. ‘To be alone here is unnerving. But surely much can be done when there are two of us together?’

The situation was plain disaster. If I had not been well used to the silence and drip of mines, I should have panicked. Even so I sounded shrill to myself as I put a vital question to Fosworthy. No, he answered, the lights could not be turned off from the surface. The switch for the gallery lights was at the bottom of the shaft, and the rest were controlled from the changing-room.

‘If I have understood the dialogue correctly,’ he said, ‘Tom Aviston-Tresco believes you will dissolve down here long before starvation does the same for me. In that case, thinking that I must be alone and harmless, he may take steps to find me and put me out of pain. Perhaps you would tell me why he is so sure you are doomed?’

I told him. He tut-tutted.

‘And I was convinced that I had protected you completely!’ he exclaimed. ‘Bless me, you must be in some discomfort! And I kept you standing so long last night!’

I did indeed feel sore the moment he mentioned it. I took down the mirror from the wall to inspect the damage. There was surprisingly little. That young doctor had done a good job. His plaster was still in place, though blood was oozing over the top of it where a stitch may have pulled out. My head was still very tender from Miss Filk’s fortunately lady-like blow, but I felt in fair condition. If anything remained of the drug, fear and violent action had blown it out of my system.

‘How did you get picked up?’ I asked.

‘I really cannot understand it at all. I did just what you told me, only I took a bus to the Pavilion instead of the Underground. I walked away from the hotel intending to take another bus to Hammersmith and was waiting at the stop when a woman drove up and asked if I would like a lift. I thought it most kind of her, and a great stroke of luck that she chanced to be going my way. It was getting late and I knew that the landlady at 34 Petunia Avenue is accustomed to retire at eleven.’

I interrupted impatiently to ask what had happened. Didn’t he recognise the driver?

‘No, she was quite unknown to me. Of course I am not very familiar with London, but after a while I began to feel that we were not on the right road for Hammersmith. She stopped on a common somewhere, which I observed with growing anxiety was entirely deserted. Then I was seized, with a hand over my mouth, and I knew no more, as they say. I should never have suspected Tom Aviston-Tresco of having such powers of organisation.’

He didn’t need any. When Fosworthy turned up at my flat for the second time, all he had to do was to whistle up one of Miss Filk’s little friends with a car and a winning manner. Even so something had gone wrong. Fosworthy had managed to reach his hotel, and while they were waiting outside thinking that the operation was off for the night and perhaps for good, damned if his preposterous chivalry didn’t make him walk out again!

As for the car driver, no doubt Miss Filk had dreamed up some romantic story to keep her mouth shut. Anything plausible would do, for she was not going to hear any more of her passenger. Police would not waste time in serious investigation just because so erratic a person had disappeared, nor newspapers be tempted to publish a photograph of him.

Silence and cold. Drip and echo. A loneliness where there was not even so distant a cousin as a scrap of plant life for company. I took down one of the sheepskin coats and put it on.

‘Who made all this?’ I asked.

‘Alan Jedder and one or two others. I helped.’

Fosworthy showed me Jedder’s tool store. It was well equipped with crowbars, picks and shovels, and plenty of electrical spare parts. I also found two coils of instantaneous fuse and a box of detonators. Unfortunately there were no explosives.

We took a pick and a crowbar with us. Fosworthy led the way along a lit passage, twisting, sometimes very narrow, sometimes opening out into considerable caves, and never going downhill for long. Aviston-Tresco’s torch, flashed into the clefts and dark holes along our path, showed that many of them dropped away into the heart of the hills. At one point the track was tilted towards a terrifying abyss, but wide enough for reasonable safety.

The place was a typical limestone cave of unknown dimensions. In fact most of them are of unknown dimensions until the pot-holers get busy; even then picks and ropes or an underwater dive will nearly always reveal more. We had travelled something over six hundred yards when we came to the last of the lights. It was above the entrance to a low, wide cleft on the right of the path. I threw a beam into it, but could distinguish nothing. We then climbed a steep slope where there was dry earth under foot instead of rock glazed by a film of stalagmite.

‘This is the other way out, but we blocked it,’ Fosworthy said. ‘I am very concerned lest we may have done it too thoroughly.’

So was I. A big boulder looked as if it could be persuaded to roll down hill until I saw that it was held in position by smooth faces of concrete on which my pick rang and jarred.

‘How far to the surface?’ I asked.

‘Seventeen and a half feet,’ Fosworthy replied precisely.

‘What does the entrance look like from outside?’

‘It cannot be seen. We spread earth over rubble and planted grass and an elder in it.’

‘Is there any other way out?’

‘Jedder has never discovered one. But let us hope there is.’

Hope! The only hope was up the shaft and through the hatch, bales or no bales, and I wish I had recognised it then and there.

It would have taken a week to move the boulder with such tools as we had, and we should only come to more concrete, Fosworthy said. The sides of the passage, weatherworn before the entrance was blocked, were more promising. Fosworthy took over from me and valiantly wielded a pick. Every blow was driven home with the force of his obsession. Love unconquerable in battle!

We went on for hours, but it became plainer and plainer that all we were doing was digging a tunnel under a roof of solid limestone. Eventually we came up against a wall of sound rock at our working face. We should have died of starvation before we ever got through.

We resumed our sheepskin coats and drank from a dark, icy pool where drips had collected. Then we walked wearily back along the lit passage to try the hatch. In the changing-room and the shored gallery the silence sang, neutral as the grave and as indifferent to our presence. We could not reach the hatch in spite of a crazy erection of baulks of timber and the table. Fosworthy, taller than I, just touched it before our scaffolding collapsed. Even if it hadn’t, a hand—with no firm foothold beneath—was useless against half a ton of hay.

During a long rest to recover some strength we considered the only two courses open to us. We could wait in the changing-room indefinitely until Jedder and his friends opened the hatch, or we could explore the whole cave system at the risk of losing ourselves. Putting my trust in surprise, I wanted to switch off the lights and wait, though I doubted my own patience to endure such blind emptiness.

Fosworthy voted for exploration. He would. He was always an optimist when plunging at the unknown. Still, he had a case. He thought it might be days before anyone opened the hatch. That was not altogether consistent with his belief that Aviston-Tresco would come and put him out of pain as soon as the arm had been treated, but I gave way to him. Anything was better than sitting still.

All he knew was that Jedder had come across a stream. Well, that was encouraging. But it did not have to emerge on the surface; it could seep into marsh or spring up into the bed of one of the many lowland brooks. The complex of Cheddar caves was too far away for any connection to be discoverable. The extent of Wookey Hole and the other smaller caverns of the Mendips was known. I was inclined to think that the exit, if any, would be beneath the north-eastern escarpment, since any considerable spring bursting out of the limestone on the south-west would have been thoroughly investigated by local landowners hoping for another tourist gold-mine.

In the tool store Fosworthy found three lanterns, clean and full up with paraffin. A second useful discovery was a compass, which at least would allow me the illusion that I was going somewhere. We had no string, and the only rope, wound on the drum of a winch, was not long enough to be worth taking. The next best thing, though far too heavy, was a drum of electric flex. We carried this between us on a crowbar through the middle and set off.

I found that the lit passage ran very roughly west. Only one of the openings on the northern side offered a practicable route, leading us down until we came to a great bubble in the rock not far from the blocked entrance, but on a lower level. There were several clefts in the walls. One of them, which we could just pass on hands and knees, gave access to a more open system with magnificent stalactites like the ranged pipes of a cathedral organ. This was the time to start paying out flex. I had trouble already in identifying the hole by which we had entered.

We chose the easiest passage, again running sharply down hill, and soon found that without ropes our movements were very limited. Fosworthy was eager to climb down funnels which were far too dangerous. Once committed to the choice of a northwards direction, he was like a child in convincing himself that it must be right. But I wasn’t permitting any such rashness. I had experience of shafts which could be descended by jumps, drops and slithers and were utterly impossible to climb.

So we had to go where we could and accept the frequent compass readings which insisted that we had travelled round in a circle or a figure of eight. When the flex ran out we were heading south-west and had probably crossed the line of the lit passage at least one hundred feet beneath it.

The wash of a stream was now faintly audible, though hard to distinguish from the hissing of ears in that sepulchral silence. A distant plop of water from the roof would be startling as a live presence, and I would search for it with the beam of the torch. Outside the tiny circle of our lanterns, there was no such thing as direction. Not even sound had direction.

We left one of the lanterns standing on the now empty drum of flex and made our way cautiously to the edge of the water. It was running smoothly in a channel some six feet below the older terrace on which we stood and did not seem of sufficient volume to force a way out at the foot of the hills. It did flow north-east, however.

As far as my beam reached, the terrace offered no difficulty, continuing along the right bank under a roof of widely varying height. I went back to fetch the lantern and put it down to mark the small orifice through which we had come to the water. Between that point and the end of the flex there was no possibility of losing the way.

We set out along the course of the stream and may have travelled a quarter of a mile before it vanished down a hole in the floor of an irregular cavern of immense height. Leaving this sluice behind and on our left, we came to a tunnel leading steeply upwards. Water had been running down it, and I was convinced by the deposit of mud that it was surface water, possibly overflowing from spring or marsh in winter. It was blazing lunacy to follow this tempting pot-hole without flex to find the way back. But every despairing move we made was lunacy.

I still think that we were on a route to the surface which could have been managed by a properly equipped expedition. Fosworthy and I, however, were stopped by a sudden and slippery rise in the pot-hole. We dreamed of it as a sure ladder to the blessed sky, but were helpless. The next thirty feet of rock were sheer.

We turned back. I had been carefully registering the few openings out of our tunnel and had no fear of losing the way; in any case we had the deposit left by the winter torrent as a guide. Eventually we reached the flats where the stream disappeared and followed the terrace on the right bank expecting to pick up the light of the lantern at any minute. We did not pick it up. Instead, we came to a rock fall which we had certainly never crossed.

Obviously there were two streams, one a tributary of the other. We must have emerged from our pot-hole by a slightly different route, identified the sluice by ear rather than eye, and chosen the wrong terrace. The circle of dim light, within which were our bodies and our forlorn determination to live, had a radius which was ample in a narrow passage but inadequate in larger caverns where an area of blackness might be an opening or simply space. However sure we were that we had made no mistake, any mistake was possible.

We retraced our steps to try and find the correct terrace. Landmarks, such as they were, appeared unfamiliar, but that was to be expected. When approached from the opposite direction, every rock formation had a different set of shadows. At last we heard the unmistakable gurgle of the fall and arrived at it by squeezing through a slot like a couple of twisted pennies. The water was surging down from above. We were on the left bank of the stream, not the right.

My guess as to what had happened is no more good now than it was then. I had been concentrating my attention on the walls of the cave and the accidents under foot, never turning a beam on the flow of the water. Somewhere we had reached a third tributary and followed it down.

No explanation. Nothing. It was far worse than to be lost among the involutions of some vast rock chamber when one could at least keep one’s head and systematically explore the openings till they were identified. But in that sump of waters we had nothingness. Instinct, intelligence, the senses—they were all put out of action.

The worst of it was that I had been navigating by water, not by compass. I sat down and cursed—frenzied, filthy swearing. Fosworthy’s reaction was astonishing.

‘My dear man, the fear of dissolution is so absurd,’ he said. ‘It is nothing but a moment’s suffering.’

His tone was in no way unctuous, but simple, sure and comforting. However, I was in no mood for it. I remarked that when it was a question of his Cynthia he didn’t seem to enjoy more than anyone else the thought of being bloody well dissolved.

‘That is different,’ he replied. ‘I am exercised by the conditions of survival, not the fact.’

We rested, shivered and drank. We tried again. I cannot clearly remember much of it. My watch said that we spent five hours stumbling about aimlessly and getting physically weaker. It could have been seventeen hours, but the paraffin in the lantern would not have lasted that long. It went out, of course, at last, and we had nothing left but Aviston-Tresco’s excellent electric torch.

Again we heard the fall and worked towards it. We had long since given up following the courses of streams. The fall was something we knew, somewhere to die. One’s strong instinct—if I make myself plain—is not to die nowhere. The mere rediscovery comforted us a little. Fosworthy said:

‘Suppose this is the bottom of the sluice which we first saw from the top.’

I replied that it didn’t matter if it was; we could not climb it.

‘Let us assume it is,’ he insisted. ‘We are travelling in a three-dimensional world which soon we will be unable to see. We must always go uphill and, when we can, always in the direction of the fall, watching the compass as long as we have light.’

It was better than giving up. The problem, of course, was how far to continue away from the fall in the hope of finding a way back towards it. The amazing thing is that we never disputed over this. I must have caught some of his gentleness.

At last we heard the gurgle of water again and knew that this time we must be well above the level of the bottom of the fall. But there was no going on. The flashlight showed a clear drop below us. At the limit of the beam was the sluice. We were looking out from a window high up in the cave which contained the original stream, unmistakably plunging downwards, the terrace we had followed, the entries to the steep pot-hole and presumably a bend of the tributary which had misled me.

Fosworthy was determined to attempt the descent. Myself, I would have gone on wandering rather than tackle that drop; but to him it was a short cut with Undine somewhere at the ultimate end of it. He hurled his coat over the edge and climbed down the first twenty feet. Then he had to let go, and fall or glissade until he fetched up against a lumpy, mushroomy growth of stalagmite. He hit it and called up that he was all in one piece.

‘I may by misadventure have broken a toe,’ he said, ‘but I shall be able to catch you.’

I threw the torch down to him, muffled in my coat. As soon as he found it and lit up the darkness, I followed. He did not exactly break my fall. He saved my life by catching a foot as I missed the stalagmites and was shooting past him.

The rest of the descent was not difficult. We then set out along the once familiar terrace, hurrying and tripping since the torch was now dying. The lantern we had left behind was, of course, out, and we searched for it desperately until one of us fell over it. We were in bad shape, Fosworthy limping and I streaming blood from a jagged wound in the neck—the result of my head swinging round in a half circle after Fosworthy grabbed me. The loose skin of the throat must have caught on a pointed stalagmite. The check possibly prevented a fracture of the skull, for, as it was, my jaw had thumped against rock hard enough to knock out a tooth.

We went through the same incompetent search for the end of the flex, which we were too dizzy with hunger and fatigue to find. At last we had it. In half an hour we were back in the lit passage. We were still alive. We shivered a little less in fresh, dry coats. That was all. There was no sign that anyone had opened the hatch.

Turning off the light to save the batteries, we tried to sleep. I suppose we did, for I remember feeling suddenly stiff, sore and immovable. When I groaned, Fosworthy groped his way to the light switch, audibly limping. I think he had long been lying quite still and awake. My watch read half past seven, but I was no longer certain whether we had been underground for thirty hours or forty-two.

‘I have been considering your future after you have dissolved,’ he said placidly. ‘Come with me! It will help you.’

The pools of dim, white light in the passage were as depressing as darkness. That crude illumination of silent rock emphasised the pitiless inhumanity of the place. As Fosworthy led me on towards the blocked entrance I reminded myself severely that we had not been long enough without food to be exhausted, and that if I had been in the outer world I should have recognised my physical distress as due to nothing but frantic activity. Consequently I began to feel that dissolution was a lot less imminent.

We came to the horizontal cleft on the right of the path, outside which was the last of the lights. Fosworthy stooped, entered and felt for a switch. Two soft floodlights at ground level and one powerful reflector overhead lit up the wearisome, eternal limestone. I could not imagine why so much trouble had been taken in a cave which was not at all remarkable except for an overhang of smooth rock like the initial curve of a dome and another irregular slope at an angle of about sixty degrees to the floor.

Then I made out the mammoth, vividly drawn in a rust-red pigment, and I swear that my first impression was not of the physical form of the animal, but of its bearing, its mood. In spite of the spears stuck in flanks and belly, it was unaggressive. It was melancholy in the moment of death, almost trusting. It received. One could well imagine that it forgave.

At first I paid no attention to the animated black lines around it and turned to the floodlit overhang covered with beasts, sometimes in groups deliberately composed, sometimes overlying each other where bosses of rock had tempted the artist into bas-relief. There were deer, bison and horses and some strange sitting creature with short, beseeching forepaws which could have been—if the painter preserved his scale—a very large squirrel or some kind of sloth. The short ears proved that it was not rabbit or hare.

The paintings were covered by the thin glaze of the limestone walls which had preserved them like the glass over a picture. A better geologist than I, who knew how long it took to form a millimetre of the deposit, could probably date the paintings within a thousand years. They belonged to the same tradition as the art of Altamira, Lascaux and the Pyrenean caves, yet were livelier and perhaps less delicate. Movement and expression were what the artist was after, just as in the prehistoric picture galleries of the Spanish caves. But, unlike his southern contemporaries, this animal lover—was he hunter, priest or gourmet?—did not leave out human beings though he drew them conventionally, with no attempt at the tender realism of the animals. A lively little black figure with angular lines for arms and legs was good enough for a man.

‘Now you understand,’ Fosworthy said. ‘They believed that in my distress I had told you, and that you had lent me money so that I could go into hiding and keep quiet.’

I did understand. Buy your hotel, buy up any land available for the hot-dog stands, the motor-coach parks and the souvenir shops, and when all is safely in the bag, send a postcard to the British Museum! No wonder Aviston-Tresco was confident that I would give nothing away to the police until I had completed my plans! The cave system—that and that alone—had puzzled me as a motive for so much desperation, since it was on Jedder’s land and he could control access as he liked. But this was a possession for the whole world. It would and ought to become a place of pilgrimage.

All the same, I could only stare at Fosworthy’s agitation. People were certainly going to make a lot of undeserved money when the secret was out. But what about it?

‘It is not the paintings themselves,’ he said. ‘It is their profound religious significance.’

This was what Dunton had got hold of. He knew the beliefs from one or more patients; he knew, as many other local inhabitants must have, of meetings; he knew of the Apology for giving death, of the fellowship with animals and the seemingly inconsistent obsession with hunting. But he had not the faintest suspicion that the small sect preserved an objective secret.

‘So this is what started you off?’

‘No, no!’ Fosworthy exclaimed as if I had doubted his power to think independently. ‘Our group had been in existence for some years. Many of us were impressed by the Quakers who are influential in this part of the county. Excellent people, but too easily content!’

He meant, I suppose, the same criticism as when he described Dunton as limited. Nobody could be more sane and healthy than Quakers; but I can well see that the mystics and eccentrics still inseparable for the Isle of Glass might find the admirable influence of the Friends too simple for them.

I gathered that Fosworthy, the Bank Manager and a handful of others had formed a mild vegetarian circle which used to contemplate the Unity of Life. That was the start. I wish I had listened more patiently; but when his eyes began to shine and his gestures to be too emphatic, I could only see the abnormality.

‘Who found the cave?’ I asked.

‘Miss Filk. Her wretched Dobermans put up a fox which went to ground under a rock. Jedder, who is a keen rider to hounds, visited the place a week later to stop the earth, as I believe it is called, and made his way inside. He kept quiet about it. He saw it as a mere curiosity which he would not allow to disturb his life. Another man would have thought only of the admission fees. But Alan Jedder looks inward.’

I was about to say that he wouldn’t much like what he saw. But he probably did. No doubt he congratulated himself, like the rest of us, on being an individual of wonderful potentialities.

‘Then one day, exploring alone, he found the paintings. He invited Aviston-Tresco and myself to see them. We all realised very soon that here was the synthesis we sought.’

The earnestness of the synthesis went on and on and I tried to take it in—since Aviston-Tresco’s opinions were responsible for my almost certain death—while mind and eyes were day-dreaming among the lovely simplicities of human life twenty-five thousand years ago. I could see how the dying mammoth might stir the imagination of our crowded world in which an animal is a pet or a potential carcass. The recognition between hunter and hunted of the divinity in each is lost to us.

Then the lights went out. I could not think for fear. After a few seconds they came on again. I thanked God, and tried to reconstruct causes, all unlikely, of a breakdown in so elementary a system. They went out again, and stayed out.

‘I told you he would look for me,’ Fosworthy said.

I hoped he was right and that someone had come down through the hatch and switched off the lights to immobilise us, if either of us were alive. Assuming that a fuse had gone, we had no hope of ever finding our way back along the passage. In theory it could be done by feeling for the wires, but I doubted if that would be possible in practice; there were too many openings and obstacles where the line was overhead and out of reach. In darkness the passage was merely a random route, undiscoverable except by chance. Turn round twice and that was the end.

‘Where will he look?’ I asked.

‘If I am not near the entrance, he will look here, where of course I should choose to wait.’

‘And what then?’

‘I presume he will help me to dissolve peacefully. He seemed certain that I should be alone.’

I had forgotten the puncture from the van seat. Naturally! By now I was equally sore all over. However, I felt quite capable of waiting for a far sorer Aviston-Tresco along the track. What good it would do was more doubtful. According to Fosworthy, nobody committed himself to that labyrinth unless a companion was left at the top of the hatch.

Pulling Fosworthy by the hand, I felt my way out of the painted cave. It was the only time when he seemed reluctant to live. Perhaps the haunting influence of that calm mammoth overcame his desire for Undine. We followed the wires some little way and then turned into a confused tumble of ledges and pinnacles just off the track. I had passed it three times and knew it would give cover from any searching beam and from the passage lights. As for getting out again, one had simply to scramble downhill in any direction and follow the cave wall.

First of all we heard Aviston-Tresco’s voice.

‘Barnabas! My poor Barnabas! Where are you?’

It boomed and trilled and echoed and died away, once returning seconds later with a faint, uncanny ‘Barnabas!’

They passed the recess where we were. Jedder had a miner’s lamp on his forehead and carried a twelve-bore gun. Aviston-Tresco had one arm in a sling and a lantern in his free hand. They were careless and confident, showing that Fosworthy was right and that they did not expect to have to deal with me.

They went on into the painted cave. If we had had any light, then was our chance to reach the entrance before they could. As it was, we were helpless. I was sure only of finding my way back to the wired passage, and that might well have taken ten minutes of patient concentration.

So far as we could tell, they were now examining the blocked entrance where they must have been impressed by Fosworthy’s burrowings. Aviston-Tresco still was calling. The wail of his voice through the black emptiness at last got on Fosworthy’s nerves. He jumped to his feet before I could stop him and shouted:

‘You can go to blazes, Tom! I’ll get out of here yet!’

He sounded like a cocky schoolboy. He really was the most contradictory man. A pity that he ever had a fixed income behind which he could retire! If he had been compelled to come to terms with the world, he was as likely to have ended up as a mad mercenary in the Congo as a vegetarian in a country cottage.

They came running back, but it was impossible for them to fix the direction of the sound. I whispered to Fosworthy to lie still and shut up, reminding him of the gun under Jedder’s arm. He apologised, far too loud, for forgetting his duty to protect me.

‘We had better have the lights on,’ Jedder said.

He had arranged a relay system for this. He walked round the next corner and yelled ‘Light!’ Far away I heard the call repeated. Then there was silence while some other helper presumably shouted the message back. The lights came on.

The pair did not attempt to look for Fosworthy. From their point of view, he might be anywhere—the maze of rock where he actually was or in some cleft or above or below them—and half a dozen strides would take him into darkness. Aviston-Tresco wanted, I believe, to avoid that, and was genuinely anxious that his former friend should dissolve without the long agony of starvation and blindness.

‘There will be a meeting tonight, Barnabas,’ he said in a voice which would have been normal and inviting if the sinister echoes had not repeated it.

They retired slowly towards the changing-room, carrying out some perfunctory searches on the way to look for my dead or prostrated body. I suspected that Jedder was not quite convinced that Aviston-Tresco had dealt with me successfully. He liked to have space and plenty of light around him and was continually turning round in case the unknown was following him. It was. We did in fact make some distance towards the entrance before the lights went out; but it was impossible to get ahead of the pair or to attack from behind.

Just in time we had passed the stretch of track with the foul drop on the right and were now in one of the finest caverns, high and with many openings, though most of them were dead ends. The only sane course was to stay exactly where we were till the time of the meeting. If we were not to exhaust ourselves looking for each other, we had to keep in actual, physical touch.

I asked Fosworthy what on earth Aviston-Tresco and that grim-faced brute Jedder were doing in his circle, some of whom would refuse to swat a mosquito. He accused me in his most academic tone of not paying attention to his precious synthesis and had another shot at it—now very much clearer since he was not distracted into mysticism by the presence of the paintings.

I will explain it very shortly at the risk of losing the metaphysical undertones. His unworldly, kindly little sect believed that all living things were individual radiations from a Whole and therefore equally worthy of respect. Yet they could not help seeing, being surrounded by a rural, traditional society, that the hunters of foxes, the fishers of trout and the shooters of game had a far more sympathetic understanding of animals than they did.

Put it this way! If a tame fox could choose the most loving and generous boss for himself, he would certainly pick a master of fox hounds, not a well-intentioned Fosworthy.

This, however, did not bother them so much as the paradox of Aviston-Tresco. All of them felt great admiration for him, yet his profession involved as much killing as healing. They were groping for the common ground between those who detested killing, those who had to do it and those who found it healthy and natural, when Jedder discovered the paintings. There were these ancestors of ours accepting that there was no difference between themselves and the animals, certain that the spirits of all continued to exist, yet killing to eat as steadily as any sabre-tooth tiger.

So all of them arrived at the madly logical conclusion that since Life was one and survival unavoidable, killing was immaterial. But admittedly it caused pain and inconvenience. Therefore it must be carried out with formality and a request for forgiveness.

Absurd? Well, meet the eyes of any bird or animal which is dying by your hand! In the last throes the eyes, which at first were terrified, accept what is coming. I have never said ‘Forgive me!’ but I recognise that I have wanted to. I cannot pretend to know, as those fanatics did, what the mammoth was thinking as its life drained out, but I am sure what that brilliantly perceptive artist and his fellow hunters were thinking.

I have no way of reconstructing the steps by which a vet, a handful of vegetarians and a few sportsmen came to find consolation in the same creed. Obviously they were all intensely religious in the sense that they wanted answers to unanswerable questions. Before I turned up, it had never occurred to Aviston-Tresco and Jedder that taking the life of a man was no different to taking that of an animal, but once they had convinced themselves that Fosworthy and I threatened their peace, it did occur to them.

‘What caused the row?’ I asked him.

‘I told you. I wanted my woman. I said that what happens to love after dissolution was the only essential, that it was nonsense to talk of momentary inconvenience. A bird in the hand—if I may permit the vernacular to simplify my argument—is worth two in the bush. It was all so vital to me that I did, as Tom Aviston-Tresco said, threaten to make the controversy public and the cave too. I fear that sometimes my voice grows too excited. They thought I was out of my mind. People do, you know. I think you yourself were at first unsure of my sanity.’

I was. But even this explanation did not wholly account for the persistence with which Fosworthy had been hunted down.

‘And then I ran out,’ he went on, ‘with all of them shouting after me. Eventually they put me under restraint.’

‘Suppose Aviston-Tresco had caught you before you reached me, what would he have done?’

‘Put me back.’

‘Where?’

‘Here.’

‘You mean, you were held here? All alone?’

‘Yes. Until I would give my word of honour to keep silent.’

There at least they understood his character. It was unthinkable that so scrupulous a formalist would break his promise, even if given under duress.

‘For how long?’

‘It was very disturbing in the dark. Especially to a person of my temperament.’

‘How long do you think?’ I repeated.

‘Jedder cut off the light and took away my matches. It was not until I reached you that I found it had been only twenty-four hours. I must indeed have seemed to you distraught.’

‘And how did you get out in the end?’

‘I am much afraid they drove me to violence when they came down to see if I were ready to surrender. As they were not expecting such behaviour from me, it was temporarily successful. But not decisive. Aviston-Tresco was already half-way up the ladder behind me when I got out of the hatch.’

So there at last was the full motive. It was not wholly because they wanted to protect the cave and to go on contemplating their discovery in peace. Above all they wanted to protect their precious selves, like most other criminals.

Those potentially dangerous people, as Dunton had called them, flared up at the very thought that their private chapel might be vulgarised and, to them, desecrated; then they were even more alarmed that Fosworthy might report what they, prominent and respectable local citizens, had done to him; and finally, when they were convinced that both their secret and their cruelty had come to the knowledge of a stranger who was only out to make money, at least two of them decided that dissolution—their gende and fatuous euphemism—was the only way out.

We slept for some hours, huddled together to keep ourselves warm, and were awakened by the line of lamps. The big cavern where we were concealed was fairly well lit. Jedder, impressed by it, had at some time climbed up to fix two overhead lights. In contrast, the darkness of the holes was absolute. We found one which offered several ways of retreat.

They came in a trailing group through the cave, following the lit passage. Aviston-Tresco was not with them. His exertions in the early morning must have been too much for his lacerated forearm. The appearance of the three men who led the way made it likely that they were sporting farmers, but they had not the tough, humorous faces of the breed. Though it may have been the hard light on high cheekbones, they seemed to me to have a common quality of cold, puritan self-discipline. I’d have trusted any of them where money was concerned, but run a mile from any contact with his private emotions. Then came the Bank Manager accompanied by a mild friend of the Fosworthy type with a thin, fair beard.

Miss Filk followed, a square and decisive Diana, leading two of her Dobermans. It said something for their training that they could negotiate the ladder. She made the casual group look like a procession, and I felt that her hounds would not be out of place in the painted cave. That seemed to be the lot, and I had high hopes of running for the entrance as soon as they had passed out of the cavern. Whatever Fosworthy said, the chap left in charge of the hatch and the switches was going to experience violence if I could get at him.

And then, behind the rest, came Jedder with Undine. She was well wrapped in a fur coat of her own. Her slender neck vanished into its illusory protection like a pencil of cascading waiter into rock. Impossible not to speculate on where it went. Difficult to accept the answer: nowhere. I must admit that in the underworld she was exquisite.

I could see that she had not been let into the secret before. The wonder and excitement in her face were genuine. Jedder and Aviston-Tresco had taken a chance that she would keep silent out of loyalty to Miss Filk or else they meant to give her a formal Apology later—in which case they might well have received one in return from her formidable protector.

It was hopeless. Fosworthy rushed away from me, grotesque as some emaciated ape from the depths of the limestone, hobbling on one foot with his filthy sheepskin flying behind him. His Dulcinea received him with her usual immaculate sweetness. She had clearly been warned that this was; likely to happen. She knew from her own experience that he was wildly eccentric in spite of his strange charm, and she may have thought it a kindly act to trap him for his friends.

‘You never told me you had joined us,’ he said. ‘I never knew.’

‘But you will come back with me?’

‘It’s quite all right, Barnabas,’ Jedder assured him.

He was in a daze of weakness, and in the presence of his Undine only capable of worship. I think that’s the right word. I doubt if he formulated to himself precisely the tracing of those veins with hands and lips as that Midlands psychiatrist did. He was just certain that present and future were worthless without unspecified union with her. And now the outer world beckoned and Jedder approved and she was willing to be escorted by him back to the light.

But even so he did not forget me. His chivalry, his self-imposed duty to protect me, came up against his infatuation and won.

‘I would like, if I may, to accompany you all,’ he said.

I knew him well enough to see what he was up to. Whenever Fosworthy stopped to reflect, one could hear the wheels go round. He had calculated that if all the party went on peacefully towards the painted cave the way was clear for me to reach the hatch.

Jedder, too, hesitated. I don’t know what instructions he had received from Aviston-Tresco or what he had in store for Fosworthy. The position was very tricky. All those people in the cave knew that Fosworthy had disappeared and why. But how had he returned? Possibly it had been explained to them that he had been found and was being held downstairs until other arrangements could be made. That was a good enough story for the milder souls who were appalled at the thought that he might impetuously publicise their secret but were quite incapable of murdering him.

Jedder had to make up his mind quickly. I am sure that the unexpected and convenient spot where Fosworthy had appeared made it up for him. He sent the others on, and allowed Fosworthy to follow with his enchantress. As soon as they had entered the passage which led out of the cavern, he ran after them. I was just about to get clear of my hiding-place when I saw him reach up and cut the loop of wire which turned the corner. At once and very silently he rushed up the familiar passage before anyone could recover from surprise and start feeling for matches or flashlights. Neither Fosworthy nor his girl had one. I heard the yell—of protest rather than terror—as Fosworthy went over the edge of the abyss, and Jedder shouting:

‘Oh my God, he’s slipped!’

There was nothing I could do. I was in absolute blackness. The whole party returned to the cavern. Some of them now had electric torches in hand, and I watched the beams and points of light flashing nervously all over the place, occasionally lighting a face, usually the lower part of a body. It was a world of shadows and unrecognisable half-humans. I shut my eyes against it and prayed that Fosworthy had been right and that he had in fact dissolved into an existence sunlit and forgiving, not into a hell without certainties such as he had left behind.

Undine was sobbing with shock.

‘He was walking just outside me,’ she kept on saying. ‘Outside me to protect me from the drop.’

‘I tried to catch him as he slipped,’ Jedder insisted.

They yammered uncontrollably, and Miss Filk’s dogs, catching the mood, began to bark. A voice remarked:

‘We have to leave him there. It’s better so.’

‘It will avoid questions,’ Jedder agreed. ‘And I promise you that only three of us know he was ever found.’

I could bear it no longer. I was light-headed with fatigue and hunger and sorrow. If I had not relieved myself by some expression I should have charged out and run amok.

‘You bloody bastard!’ I yelled.

There was panic. Nobody but Jedder knew anything at all of my existence. The beams searched all over the sweating walls which disguised sound. Two or three correctly pinpointed my position. I slid back unseen into the cleft behind me.

Jedder ordered them all back to the entrance at once, but Miss Filk stood her ground. She shouted in her most masculine manner:

‘Who the devil is that?’

And then she let the two Dobermans off the leash and sicked them on to me. I heard them patter over the rocks and into my bolt-hole. There was no handy ledge up which to jump—and I should only have been treed there—but by a stroke of luck Miss Filk’s flashlight as she charged after her savage brutes showed a loose rock.

I lifted it in both hands, like former inhabitants of the cave, and crashed it down on the head of the first dog as he sank his teeth into my shielding coat. The other ran away, howling. It was an uncanny place in which to ask a dog to attack, especially when the eyes of the hunted had acquired mysterious night sight if any light at all was reflected from the glazed wall of the cave.

Miss Filk caught the contagion of terror from her remaining dog and tied herself up among the rocks. She was quite correct in thinking I was close behind her. I badly needed her torch. I doubt if she even knew how she lost it. Her screams brought up some dim figures to collect her who were furiously attacked by the Doberman. Her efforts to control it restored her normally firm character.

I saw their lights disappear on the way to the entrance. I could, I suppose, have chased and haunted the lot of them until they were incapable with fear. But I was on my last legs and in no condition to meet a determined Jedder who knew only too well what my physical weakness must be even if I had survived Aviston-Tresco’s attentions.

So I went back to the recess for the body of the dog and put it across my shoulders, hanging on to the four legs. That collapsed me in a few strides. My civilised intention was to cook the meat, but nature was insistent. Lying there with my head on the warm body and a better blade in my pocket than the flints of the cave painters I lapped back my life as they would have lapped.

I lay there in the empty silence. How long I do not know. It must have been hours, for I became very thirsty and the dog was stiffening. I remember whimpering with self-pity as I started for the entrance by the light of Miss Filk’s torch, dragging the carcass behind me. It puzzled me that I had succeeded in lifting it to my shoulders. I must have been compelled by some obsession in my exhausted mind that lifting was the right way. An influence of the hunters, perhaps.

The torch began to fade and glow pink. I stumbled about in a frantic search for paraffin by the light of matches which I had noticed with the lanterns in the changing-room. At last I found a full five-gallon can under the steps, filled a lantern and lit it. That was about the only moment of relief, almost of content, which I had known since I was unloaded into the barn upstairs.

There were some pit-props in the tool store, so I built a fire on the spot and half-grilled Doberman chops over a couple of iron crowbars. They tasted delicious. Two days later, when my hunger was appeased, they tasted utterly foul and I had to force myself to eat them.