Сарбан - Ringstones

“You know,” Daphne resumed, “I really did think that there were stairs there. I can't quite picture that hall without them. I can see now, I think, that all my dreams about the place were pieced together from what you'd told me before, not from what I actually saw there. I don't think I was quite conscious any of the time from that faint I did until waking up the next morning in bed here. At any rate, I have no clear idea at all of being put into the trap and brought back. Perhaps—I don't know—some disjointed land of impression of turning wheels and a whip cracking. But the next morning, although I woke up feeling all right except that my ankle hurt, I was absolutely certain that I had spent the whole time from that faint in one tremendous crowded dream and that, if I tried, I could recollect the whole of it in perfect detail, and, well, that conviction was so strong that I hobbled over to my chest of drawers and got out that new exercise book and my fountain pen and began to scribble it all down.”

She sat back and looked round at us.

“I should like to see this production,” said the doctor. “It's quite a feat to write down a dream, but it isn't by any means impossible. After all, reason and imagination step in to fill in the gaps between the genuinely recollected incidents of the dream. The neo−rosicrucians make a practice of it. I've seen some of their records of dreams. Astonishing farragos.”

I nodded. I bad seen some too. It seems to me,” I said, feeling rather pleased that my simple explanation of the story as an exercise in fiction had after all been a bit nearer the mark than Piers's mystery−mongering; “it seems to me that you had all the elements of the story, or dream, that you wrote already supplied to you here, from Dr Hancock's stories of Dr Ravelin's talks with his father, from the presence of these two little Egyptian girls and the little boy. Most of the matter of Dr Ravelin's archaeological ramblings might be dream reproductions of bits you had read in some of these books here, if you've dipped into them.” (Daphne admitted she had.) “If pain can start you dreaming, and I suppose it might, perhaps underlying feelings of anxiety—I mean about your watch and getting home—might be expressed in a land of crazy story in which physical exertion and being held a prisoner were the main themes...”

Both Piers and the doctor opened their mouths and prepared to tear my theory of dreams to tatters, but I fended them off until I had got out something else that interested me in the story as a story.

“Half a tick before you Freudians charge,” I said. “Just let me say that I think I can understand your dreaming all that—even the dream within the dream. I have a dim memory of double dreams myself. But there's one of your fancies I should like to know the origin of. This sort of gladiators' school: not that the general idea of that is strange. God knows, I still occasionally dream about the agonies of being chased round the gym at my own school. But I mean the chariots. I can see that it might be an expression of that feeling you sometimes have in a dream of being fastened to something you have to haul along—something that holds you back when you want to speed away; but I should like to know where you got the actual picture of girls drawing chariots. There's something I seem to remember in an Elizabethan play about pampered jades of Asia, and there's that prince of Thai Gin in Marco Polo who had his slave−girls draw him about his palace grounds in a little light vehicle made for the purpose; there is even a doubtfully authenticated story of the Indian Mutiny which relates that a son of the Moghul Emperor, when the mutineers took Delhi, had some of the English women captives stripped and harnessed to his carriage; but I wonder what you had been reading?” Daphne grinned. “Well, I never heard that about the Indian Mutiny, and I'm ashamed to say I've never read Marco Polo. I do know the bit from 'Tamburlane,' but really, I can't think where I've read about those chariots.

They were just there: quite a usual feature of the games. It was just that I felt that if once they got me strapped up to that pole...”

She rounded her shoulders and seemed to shrink from a present physical threat.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose it just remains an unexplained quirk of the dreaming fancy, then. But still, the inspiration, so to speak, seems to me a bit inadequate. I saw that coachhouse place you mentioned, and I'm dashed if my subconscious, or imagination, or what−not, would ever have fabricated a gleaming chariot out of a few old bike wheels and bits of mouldy trap−harness.”

Daphne began to object to something, but Piers interrupted her. “That reminds me!” he exclaimed. He fished something out of his jacket pocket and laid it on the table.

“That your watch?” he asked.

Daphne picked it up. “Yes. Yes. It is. But where did you find it?” I noticed again how extraordinarily brilliant her eyes became when she was excited; their blue light held my attention so as she stared at Piers that perhaps I was slow to understand why the warm colour of her brow and cheeks which had been so attractive a setting for the eyes' brilliance had now turned dull and cold.

The little doctor took the watch from her, wound it up, shook it and held it to his ear. He gave an exclamation of pleased surprise: “Well! That's none the worse, anyway. It's going!” He began to set it by the clock on the mantelpiece.

Daphne's eyes were still fixed on Piers. “Where did you find it?” she asked again, but her voice was almost a whisper.

“Why, in that coach−house in the stable−yard,” said Piers, looking at her intently.

Dr Hancock jerked his head up. “Stable−yard!” he exclaimed. “You couldn't. Daphne never went near the stables. She couldn't have done. Could you?”

Daphne did not speak. I suddenly realised the cause of that peculiar brightness in her eyes, and I was shocked to see how far behind Piers I had been in understanding the depth of her distress. She held out both her hands, not to take the watch, but with a curious gesture of surrender as if offering the hands and wrists themselves to someone. I saw a newly−healed long cut on the inside of her left wrist plain against the sun−browned skin. She seemed to offer her wrists a moment and then, yielding to an unknown compulsion, reluctantly turned down her palms, curling her fingers round something invisible to us. No one spoke; I think we were all looking with a slowly rising fear at those two drooping hands, so helplessly waiting there. Then Piers bent swiftly across the table and seized both her hands in his, gripping them hard.

“Hold on,” he said. “The watch ticks our time. The doctor did arrive in time, you know. He did arrive.”