'Very well,' I agreed. 'You know, it wasn't the thing itself that worried me so much as the pressure of getting the scripts out afterwards. That's relaxed now.'
'Possibly,' he said. 'All the same, I think you should go and see him.'
There was something wrong, and I knew it. I didn't admit to the doctor, though I did to the Harley Street man, that it was more often Phyllis than Muriel that I saw being dragged along by her hair, and more often her than an unknown man that I saw being pulled to pieces. As a quid pro quo he told me that Phyllis had been spending most of her nights listening to me and dissuading me from jumping out of the window to interfere in these imaginary happenings.
So I agreed to go out of circulation for a time.
Nirvana is for the few; nevertheless, the old manor house in Yorkshire to which my advice led me managed to induce a passable temporary substitute. The first few days without newspapers, without radio, without letters, had a purgatorially fretful quality, but after that came an almost physical sense of taut springs relaxing. As the feeling of urgency receded my values and perspective shifted. Exercise, open air, a complete change of pattern led to a feeling of having changed gear; the engine began to settle down to a more comfortable running-speed. There was a great simplification. One seemed to grow fresher and cleaner within, larger, too, and less pushable-around. There was a new sense of stability. A very comfortable, easy pattern it was; habit-forming, I imagine.
Certainly, in six weeks I had become addicted and might have continued longer had a twenty-mile thirst not happened to take me into a small pub close upon six o'clock one evening.
While I was standing at the bar with the second pint the landlord turned on the radio, the arch-rival's news-bulletin. The very first item shattered the ivory tower that I had been gradually building. The voice said:
'The roll of those missing in the Oviedo-Santander district is still incomplete, and it is thought by the Spanish authorities that it may never be completely definitive. Official spokesmen admit that the estimate of 3,200 casualties, including men, women, and children, is conservative, and may be as much as fifteen or twenty per cent below the actual figure.
'Messages of sympathy from all parts of the world continue to pour into Madrid. Among them are telegrams from San Jose, Guatemala, from Salvador, from La Serena, Chile, from Bunbury, Western Australia, and from numerous islands in both the East and West Indies which have themselves suffered attacks no less horrible, though smaller in scale, than those inflicted upon the north Spanish coast.
'In the House to-day, the Leader of the Opposition, in giving his party's support for the feelings of sympathy with the Spanish people expressed by the Prime Minister, pointed out that the casualties in the third of this series of raids, that upon Gijon would have been considerably more severe had the people not taken their defence into their own hands. The people, he said, were entitled to defence. It was a part of the business of government to provide them with it. If a government neglected that duty, no one could blame a people for taking steps for its self-protection.
'It would be much better, however, to be prepared with an organized force. Since time out of mind we had maintained armed forces to deal with threats by other armed forces. Since 1829 we had maintained an efficient police-force to deal with internal threats. But it appeared that we had now become so administratively barren, so inventively infertile, so corporately costive that we were unable to produce the means of giving the dwellers upon our coasts that security to which their membership of this great nation entitled them.
'It seemed to the members of the Opposition that the Government, having failed to fulfil its election pledges, was now about to belie the very name of its party by its reluctance to consider means which would conserve even the lives of its electors. If this were not so, then it would appear that the policy of conservation was being carried to a length which scarcely distinguished it from niggardliness. It was high time that measures were taken to ensure that the fate which had overtaken dwellers upon the littorals, not only in Spain, but in many other parts of the world as well, could not fall upon the people of these islands.
'The Prime Minister, in thanking the Opposition for its expression of sympathy, would assure them that the Government was actively watching the situation. The exact steps that would, if necessary, be taken would have to be dictated by the nature of the emergency, if one should arise. These, he said, were deep waters: there was much consolation to be found in the reflection that the British Isles lay in shallow waters.
'The name of Her Majesty the Queen headed the list of subscribers to the fund opened by the Lord Mayor of London for the relief '
The landlord reached over, and switched off the set.
'Cor!' he remarked, with disgust. 'Makes yer sick. Always the bloody same. Treat you like a lot of bloody kids. Same during the bloody war. Bloody Home Guards all over the place waiting for bloody parachutists, and all the bloody ammunition all bloody well locked up. Like the Old Man said one time: his bloody-self, "What kind of a bloody people do they think we are?"'
I offered him a drink, told him I had been away from any news for days, and asked what had been going on. Stripped of its adjectival monotony, and filled out by information I gathered later, it amounted to this:
In the past weeks the scope of the raids had widened well beyond the tropics. At Bunbury, a hundred miles or so south of Fremantle in Western Australia, a contingent of fifty or more sea-tanks had come ashore and into the town before any alarm was given. A few nights later La Serena, in Chile, was taken similarly by surprise. At the same time in the Central American area the raids had ceased to be confined to islands, and there had been a number of incursions, large and small, upon both the Pacific and Gulf coasts. In the Atlantic, the Cape Verde Islands had been repeatedly raided, and the trouble spread northward to the Canaries and Madeira. There had been a few small-scale assaults, too, on the bulge of the African coast.
Europe remained an interested spectator. Ex Africa semper aliquid novi may be translated, with a touch of freedom, as: 'Funny things happen in other places,' conveying that Europe, in the opinion of its inhabitants, is the customary seat of stability. Hurricanes, tidal waves, serious earthquakes, et cetera, are extravagances divinely directed to occur in the more exotic and less sensible parts of the earth, all important European damage being done traditionally by man himself in periodical frenzies. It was not, therefore, to be seriously expected that the danger would come any closer than Madeira or, possibly, Rabat or Casablanca.
Consequently, when, five nights before, the sea-tanks had come crawling through the mud, across the shore, and up the slipways at Santander, they had entered a city that was not only unprepared, but also largely uninformed about them.
From the moment they were observed opinion split into two parties; roughly the modern and the classical. Someone in the former telephoned the garrison at the cuartel with the news that foreign submarines were invading the harbour in force; someone else followed up with the information that the submarines were landing tanks; yet another somebody contradicted that the submarines themselves were amphibious. Since something was certainly, if obscurely, amiss, the soldiery turned out to investigate.
Meanwhile, the sea-tanks had entered the streets. It was immediately clear to the more classically-minded citizens that, since the advancing objects were no known form of machine, their origin was likely to be diabolic, and they aroused their priests. The visitants were conjured in Latin to return to their Captain, the Father of Lies, in the Pit whence they had come.