Сарбан - Ringstones

Piers wrinkled his brows. “And you'd heard about this before you went to Ringstones?” he asked Daphne. “Yes,” she said, “but I wasn't thinking about it particularly. I didn't much mind being left alone in the old

Hall. It was broad daylight, after all. And my ankle was hurting far too much for me to worry about anything

else.”

“Yes, now, but let me finish the facts,” said Dr Hancock. “I got down to Blagill, and by good luck I caught Joe Iddenden just as he was going out. I got him to yoke out the pony trap and come back with me at once. I suppose all told I was away from Daphne about two and a half hours. When Joe and I got back she was lying on the floor in a dead faint. I brought her round and we got her into the trap; but she was in a very distressed condition and I was puzzled, because the effect didn't seem altogether due to shock from the sprain, and there hadn't been all that loss of blood from the laceration of her wrist. Joe was very good. After I had given Daphne some treatment at his place he drove us all the way back here. I never thought about his adventure with the Polish girl then, but I'll bet he did! Daphne was a good deal better when we got home. We put her to bed, and apart from the sprain and a rather low temperature and slow pulse her condition was normal. By next morning she was quite well in herself. There now, those are the facts.”

“I see,” said Piers. “But you've missed out one, haven't you?” “What?” asked Daphne, quickly.

“You had lost your watch, hadn't you?”

“Yes,” she said. “That's perfectly true. The strap had broken. I put it in my coat pocket. They're shallow little pockets, and somewhere it must have fallen out. Perhaps when I fell down. I didn't miss it until Dr Hancock had left me, though.”

“Well,” I said, “but what did happen?”

I'm afraid this inquest was rather hard on Daphne. She looked very uncomfortable, and though she was obviously trying not to be self−conscious about it, I'm sure she was heartily wishing she had never obeyed the impulse to send that wretched exercise book to Piers.

“I don't really know how to explain this,” she said, as much to Dr. and Mrs. Hancock as to Piers and me. “You know I amused myself while I had to stay indoors with this sprain by scribbling in an exercise book? I didn't show you what I'd written, because, well, it seemed such nonsense when it was written down. I just couldn't believe it myself, and yet I felt I simply had to write it all down. I suppose, having written it, I ought to have kept it to myself, but something—I really don't know what... I mean, like you do with a dream, I wanted to tell it; and Piers knows me, and so, on the spur of the moment I wrote a letter saying how I had come to write it, then parcelled the thing up and sent it off. I never dreamed, of course, that Bobby hadn't posted the letter. You must have wondered what on earth it was when you got the book without any explanation. But, I mean, how could I have imagined you'd go off to Ringstones to look for me?”

“Never mind,” I said comfortingly. “We enjoyed it. I wouldn't have missed that bog−hole for worlds.”

“If there is a bog−hole anywhere within reach you never do miss it,” retorted Piers. “But still, what I should like to know is where you think the story came from. I mean, how did it happen in your mind? I must send it back so that you can read it,” he said to the Hancocks, “if Daphne doesn't mind.”

Daphne hesitated. “Well,” she said frowning a little and scraping the crumbs on the cloth together with her finger, “well, it was a sort of dream, or a lot of dreams. I know that sounds impossible: I mean, one couldn't normally dream all that—all those conversations and so on. It's frightfully difficult to express this, but you yourself must have had a dream something like that at some time. I mean, one where you wake up and although you can only remember clearly one or two incidents, or one or two sentences that someone has said in your dream, yet you have the strongest feeling that there was a tremendous amount more that you just fail to remember, something that's there, and yet just eludes your grasp.”

“The tail of the mouse disappearing down the hole,” I said. “Yes, I've sometimes had that feeling after a dream.”

“Well,” she said, “this was like that, but somehow a much stronger feeling and such a vivid sense of reality that really, while I was writing it down, I did seem to be recollecting actual facts. As soon as I put pen to paper the whole thing came pouring back: I knew that all that talk of Dr Ravelin's that I'd dreamed must have been like that, and I knew I must have seen the park just like that, and that the girls and Nuaman must have done what they did do. I mean, I don't say that I remembered all that talk word for word, but I woke up with sentences perfectly clear in my mind and I knew that if so−and−so had been said then all the other must have led up to it.”

I thought I understood what she was trying to say, and Piers supported her by telling us that once before his Tripos he had woken up in the morning convinced that he had composed a complete series of answers to a paper on Seventeenth Century Drama in his sleep.

The doctor was interested. “When did the dreams begin?” he asked Daphne.

“That's one of the funny things about it,” she said. “I can't quite decide. I know that for a time after you left me in the hall there at Ringstones I didn't think about anything very much except the pain in my ankle and my wrist and how I was to get back; though, at the same time, I was worrying about my watch. It's only a cheap one, but I wish I hadn't lost it. Then I remember feeling cold, which was odd, because the day was close and sultry. I think I did get a bit frightened then. I began to feel that the place was awfully still and lonely, though there were faint little noises rustling about in some of the rooms, and quite suddenly, I remember, I heard some people, children they sounded like, laughing and calling to each other outside. I was absolutely convinced I heard them. I just couldn't catch the words, but they were voices. I wasn't frightened, simply because they were so real. I was thinking more of the shock they were going to get if they came inside and saw me sitting there at the foot of the stairs.”

“The jackdaws,” I suggested. “They can sound very human. They and the noise of the beck. I've once or twice been as convinced myself when we've been camping near a hill stream that someone was talking close by and had to get up to assure myself it was only the water.”

“Yes,” said Daphne doubtfully. “Yes, I suppose that must have been it. But then someone came down the stairs behind me and touched me at the back of the neck and then I fainted.”

“What!” we all shouted together. “Down the stairs? There aren't any stairs!”

Daphne looked really startled. “Aren't there?” she asked incredulously. “But I sat on them. That's where you made me sit down while you bandaged my ankle, isn't it?” She turned to Dr Hancock.

The doctor looked at her very keenly. “You sat on the bottom step,” he said. “But that's all there was to sit on. The rest of the stairs were taken out long ago. Didn't you notice when we went in? Well, no, perhaps you wouldn't. I suppose that ankle was giving you enough pain to distract your mind from your surroundings at that moment. That's rather an interesting example of the power of suggestion. You were sitting on a stair with your back to where the rest of the stairs ought to be, and even though you can perhaps feel that there's nothing behind you, yet your subconscious mind makes the assumption that the rest of the stairs are there. But I should say that in recalling what happened you have involuntarily transposed two events: you fainted first—the fatigue and shock could account for that—and after a partial recovery of consciousness there was this hallucination of hearing footsteps and being touched. There may even have been a slight delirium, though, at the time, the injury didn't seem to me sufficient. But you never know. I once saw a hefty Egyptian fellah pass clean out from a subcutaneous injection.”