The Sword and the Net полностью

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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