Finally he jogged off toward his study window, pounding his fist over and over into his hand in a fit of nervous energy. His mind was a turmoil of conflict. He had to sort things out…The ground outside the French windows was soft, kept wet by water falling off the overhanging eaves. A line of shoeprints paralleled the wall, as if someone had come sneaking along it, stepping onto the bush in order to sandwich himself in toward the window without being seen. In his excitement St. Ives hadn’t seen the prints, but he stooped to examine them now. The toes were pressed deeply into the dirt, so whoever it was had been hunched over forward, keeping low, moving slowly and heavily. Small shoeprints again, though. Certainly not his own.
St. Ives hurried back into the study. He opened a desk drawer and rooted through it, pulling out papers and books until he found a cloth-wrapped parcel. He pulled the cloth away, revealing four white plaster-of-Paris shoeprint casts. He turned them over, and, on the bottom, printed neatly in ink, were dates and place-names. The first set was dated six months past, taken in Sterne Bay from the dirt outside the icehouse. The second pair were taken a week past, down along the River Nidd. They were from different pairs of shoes of the same size.
He put the first pair back into the drawer and carried the second outside, laying them into appropriate prints. They settled in perfectly. On his hands and knees he squinted closely at one of the heel prints in the dirt. The back outside corner of the heel was gone, worn away, so that the heel print looked like someone’s family crest, but with a quarter of the shield lopped away. An image leaped into his mind of Parsons walking along in his usual bandy-legged gait, scuffing the leather off the corners of his heels. The heels on the plaster casts were worn out absolutely identically. There couldn’t be any doubt, or almost none. Parsons had come snooping around. He couldn’t have been entirely positive that the man he had seen skulking along the river had been Parsons. It had been late evening, and drizzling. Whoever it had been, though, it was the same man who, within the last half hour or so, had sneaked along the wall of the house, stepped into the bush and broke off the limb, and then, no doubt, peered in at the window.
He climbed back into the room, rewrapping the plaster casts and closing them up in the drawer. Then, pulling on his coat, he strode out across the meadow once again like a man with a will, noticing only when he was halfway to the River Nidd that he still wasn’t wearing any shoes.
He returned late that afternoon in an improved mood, although he felt agitated and anxious. He had spent three hours with Lord Kelvin. The great scientist had come to understand that tragedy had turned St. Ives into a natural fool. He had even patted St. Ives on the head once, which had been humiliating, but to some little extent St. Ives had been grateful for it — a sign, he realized, of how dangerously low his spirits had fallen. But things were looking up now. His efforts weren’t doomed after all, although he was certain that he was running a footrace with Parsons and the Royal Academy. When they were sure of themselves, they would merely break down the silo door — come out with a dozen soldiers and checkmate him. The game would be at an end.
The idea of it once again darkened his thoughts. His elation at having swindled Lord Kelvin out of certain tidbits of information suddenly lapsed, and he slumped into his chair feeling fatigued and beaten. He seemed to swing between two extremes — doom and utter confidence. Middle ground had become the rarest sort of real estate. What he needed, desperately, was to be levelheaded, and here he was atilt again, staggering off course.
Tomorrow, though, or the next day, he would set out. Right now he would rest. Lord Kelvin had taken pity on him this afternoon. That was the long and the short of it. One look at St. Ives’s face, at his disheveled clothes, and Lord Kelvin had been ready to discuss anything at all, as if he were talking to the village idiot. The man had a heart like a hay wagon, to be sure. St. Ives’s wandering over without any shoes on had probably done the trick. Kelvin had finally warmed to the subject of time travel, and St. Ives had led him through a discussion of the workings of the machine itself as if he were a trained ape.
That was clever, he told himself, going out shoeless was. He half believed it for a moment. Then he knew that it hadn’t been clever at all; he had gone out shoeless without meaning to, and in late autumn, yet. He would have to watch that sort of thing. They’d have him tied down in Colney Hatch if he wasn’t careful. He was too close to success. He couldn’t chance a strait-waistcoat. Seeing things clearly for the moment, he looked at himself in the cheval glass on the desk. A haircut wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. Perhaps if a man affected sanity carefully enough…
Almost happy again, he stepped into his slippers and lit a pipe, sitting back and puffing on it. Failure — that’s what had squirreled him up. Too much failure made a hash of a man’s mind…He thought for a moment about his manifold failures, and suddenly and inexplicably he was awash with fear, with common homegrown panic. He found that he could barely keep his hands still.
Immediately, he tried to recite the cottage-pie recipe, finding that he couldn’t remember it. He pulled a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and studied the writing on it. There it was — sage and sweet basil. Not sweetbread. He could feel his heart flutter like a bird’s wings, and he felt faint and light-headed. Desperately, he breathed for a moment into a sack until the light-headedness began to abate. Sweetbread? Why had he thought of sweetbread? That was some kind of gland, wasn’t it? Something the French ate, probably out of buckets and without the benefit of forks.
With an unpleasant shock, he noticed just then that someone had cleaned up his desk. The debris on the floor was separated into tidy piles against the wall. The papers were shuffled, and the books stacked. The glass and ceramic figurines were dusted and lined up together. The neatened desk baffled him for a moment. Then, slowly, a dark rage began to rise in him, and the whole business of an orderly desk became an affront.
He bent down and tossed together the stuff on the floor, mixing it into a sort of salad. Then he kicked through it, sending it flying, winding himself up. He turned to the desk itself, methodically picking up books and shaking out the loose leaves so that they fluttered down higgledy-piggledy. He picked up a heavy iron elephant paperweight and one by one smashed his quill pens, accidentally catching the squared-off edge of the crystal ink bottle and smashing it too, so that ink spewed out across his shirtfront. The shock of smashing the glass made him bite down hard on the stem of his pipe. He heard and felt the stem crack, and quickly let up on it. The pipe fell neatly into two pieces, though, so that the stem stayed in his mouth and the bowl fell down onto the desktop, wobbling around in the ink and broken glass like a drunkard. Furious, he picked up the elephant again and smashed the pipe, over and over and over, until he noticed with a deep rush of demoralizing embarrassment that Mrs. Langley stood in the open door of the room, her eyes wide open with horror and disbelief.