Going back to the bench she put down her lamp and looked for her screwdriver again. She found it on the floor and began to labour at the lock of the strong press. It cost her far more effort than the other, and though she jabbed and levered and wrenched until all her fingers were cramped and her arms ached and refused to serve her without frequent rests, she could make little impression on the lock. Her mind hunted for old lessons of experience to help her, and found them at last in memories of childhood: watching her father working with tools, deliberately and methodically in an engineer's way. She straightened her back and thought the task out.
There was a saw hanging on the wall by the bench; she fetched it, and setting the lamp on the table that she had placed under the skylight to give her a better light, she sawed, clumsily but effectively, through the corner of the press above and below the lock. Then inserting her screwdriver once more in the nick of the door, she wrenched and prized until at last she rived away the wood that held the socket of the lock. The first thing that met her eye, in the front of the top shelf, was the little rack of tubes that she was looking for. She snatched the whole rack down, gave one glance at the little gouts of dark substance two of them contained, then ran with them to the fire which by now was a glowing pile of coals. She thrust the rack as it was into the heart of the red coals, then snatched up more bits of wood and heaped them over it. She could trust no method of destruction but the utterly consuming action of the flames. She ran back into the middle of the room for more wood, flinging down piles of canvases, overturning bottles and tins of brushes to drag out cases from behind the lumber stacked between the presses. She flung on fuel until there was a great fire roaring and crackling, sending a spray of sparks up the chimney.
Then, as she passed the press from which she had taken the tubes, staggering with a big packing−case full of straw in her arms, something caught her eye. She dropped her burden and went back to the press. On bursting it open she had seen nothing but the rack of tubes. Now she saw that the top shelf contained pieces of apparatus similar to those in the other press she had opened, but below that the cupboard was entirely filled with a stack of trays, one upon another like shallow drawers, with an inch or so of space between each one. Through one of these gaps her eye had caught a gleam of something fine and glossy like light−coloured spun silk, or hair.
She pulled out the drawer, and there, in neat compartments lined with soft stuff, lay orderly rows of puppets, each small figure, naked, upon its back, with hands folded on its breast, lying in its little cell as in a coffin. Clare pulled out another drawer, and another. They were all full of dolls, all arranged in the same corpse−like fashion. She bent down, and, though the lamp and fire together did not show a good light into the drawers, she made out that the eyes of each doll were shut. They had the appearance of dead people, but she knew they were not dead. These figures had no open cavity in their breasts: the element of animation was in them, suspended in a death−like sleep.
She stood, unable to move or take her eyes from the figures, while the full import of her discovery penetrated her. This ultimate deception appalled and desolated her more than all the hurt she had had, than all the terror that had grown in her since the truth of Niall's art first began to dawn upon her. The things she had seen in the Captain's Park were neither mechanical dolls as she had thought then, nor living beings, as, in spite of all reason, she had concluded later. Life of a sort, or some astounding substitute for life they must have, but it was an animation that could only appear at their master and maker's bidding. The undying life Niall promised was a lie: his people were only toys whom he alone could cause to move. All their sports, their gaiety, their loves and laughter, were but games he made them play for his amusement, and then, when he was tired of playing, he laid them like toys back in their boxes until such time as he felt in the mood for them again. This was the immortality and unchanging youth to which Niall would have condemned Jennifer and her, to which he had condemned... Understanding what had been done to give these small things their life−in−death, Clare covered her eyes and backed, cold in all her limbs, toward the table under the skylight.
She reached it, and then, slowly, as though moved against the utmost resistance of her will, she lowered her hand and turned her eyes to the door. Heavily up the stairs came a tramp of feet, loud above the crackling of the fire, hasty on the wooden stairs, rushing across the landing outside. Clare could not move, her eyes only travelled slowly to the great iron key on which the firelight glinted. The thick oak door shook under the hammering of a fist and then she heard a voice shouting: “Open! Open the door!”
It was a voice she knew, but there was a note in it she had never heard, never imagined it could ever sound. A grief so deep that it engulfed even her last dreadful discovery in its own abyss of pain opened suddenly in her breast at the recognition that it was Niall who howled at her with such inhuman menace. In the pain of that appalling change the last threads of the spell that had once bound her dissolved; blinded by tears she turned and mounted the table. She gripped the edge of the skylight frame and gave a great spring upwards. The little table rocked and went crashing over with all its load and the burning lamp. Clare, struggling through the aperture, saw the pool of flame spread out below her as the paraffin and the spilt oil from the bottles caught light, and as she slithered down the roof, saw the whole great square of glass suddenly illuminated by an unbroken yellow blaze and felt the hot draught rush down on her.
She ran, staggering and fending herself off from the trees with outstretched arms, down the steep bank away from the house; down into the drive where she wheeled and, faint and sick, tried to run on towards the gates of Brackenbine.
11
It was not disagreeable to lie propped with pillows, to feel weak and helpless and to know that it did not matter. Clare looked at the glass jar of yellow wild−flowers on the table by her bed in the Sanatorium, looked from them to Miss Geary and smiled. She smiled in answer to the old lady's enquiring look, and it was a smile, too, of gratitude. Clare was calm now, and she had a sense of the solidity of the earth and the reality of the things and people about her; she felt at home in her own world, and she was content with that security and comfort, but she was not happy. Quietly and reasonably she acknowledged that happiness would take a long time to grow again, and in the meantime, the sense of safety and reality depended on not dwelling much on what had cut down the old trees of joy. Yet she had asked Miss Geary to tell her what she knew of that last night she remembered, now, when she was clear−headed again and the doctor could promise an end to her lying in bed.
It was Matron who had first noticed the fiery glow behind Brackenbine wood, Miss Geary had said, and the Under−matron who, when more people were up and observing the fire from the upstairs windows, had discovered Clare's absence from the Sanatorium.
“Of course,” said Miss Geary, “you had been a little light−headed for some days. And you had talked about the window. I guessed that if you had climbed out in your sleep you would have gone to Brackenbine. It had been so much on your mind, hadn't it? So I just dragged Miss Linskill along with me and came to look for you. I positively had to drag her; she did want so many explanations and there just wasn't time to give them. Fortunately, you hadn't got anywhere near the house. We found you by that large flat rock, you know, on the drive.”