The descent of the golden mist separated the inhabitants of the house from the sight of each other, with the single exception of Sybil and Aaron. The servants, caught in the hall, clung together, not daring to move yet frightened to remain where they were. They felt in the closeness of hands and bodies the only suggestion of safety, as, long since, our scarcely human ancestors crowded together against night and the perils of the night. The cook gasped continuously; her hysterical companion was reduced to a shaking misery of moans; even the silent Amabel quivered spasmodically as she clutched the arms of her unseen colleagues. Between them the mist rolled and stayed.
In the corridor above, ignoring social divisions, reducing humanity to an equality of bewildered atoms, it had swept between Ralph and his father. Ralph, frankly defeated by this inexplicable amazement, fell back against the wall in a similar stupor to the cook’s. A world upon which he had all his life relied had simply ceased to exist. Mist on mountains, fogs in towns, he had heard of; sea-fogs and river-mists. But here was neither sea nor river, neither mountain nor town. Existence as he knew it had just gone out. In a minute or two he would pull himself together and do something. But this stuff, as he leaned against the wall, was damned unpleasant: the wall gave to his back, and he came hastily upright, feeling gingerly for it. He couldn’t feel it; he couldn’t feel any difference between anything.
He brought his hand towards his thigh, trying to touch himself, and couldn’t: where he ought to be was nothing but this thick consistence. He closed his hand upon itself, and what felt like fingers pressed more deeply into the same shifting and resisting matter. He could feel himself all right, so long as he didn’t definitely try to find himself. But when he did, he wasn’t there. That was silly: he was there. He put up both hands to his head — at least to where his head ought to have been, and still, if his head was there, he couldn’t get it. This porridge-like substance oozed between his fingers and clung to them — porridge or thin mud. He had had a tooth out once, and afterwards felt as if the tooth was still there. Suppose his whole body had been pulled out, and he were only feeling as if it were there. But the rest of the world? That was gone too. Suppose everything had just been pulled out — leaving only the place where it had been, and himself feeling the place, seeming sometimes full and sometimes empty? For a moment he visualized a hole in the air, out of which the round world had been neatly and painlessly extracted, but his mind, unused to metaphysical visions, refused to pursue this thought, and restored him to the simple view that he was feeling very funny, probably a bit overtired with all this snow. Nevertheless, he couldn’t forget that never in his life, fresh, tired, or overtired, had he searched for himself and not found himself. His hold on sanity depended on the fact that the fingers of either hand did sometimes rub together as he moved them, though the two hands never quite met each other. If they only could, he would be getting back to normal; something would have joined. There would have been a kind of shape, a point of new beginning, a definite fixture, in this horrible mess, where at present were only two wandering feelers, antennae moving about in a muddy mass. He wondered abruptly what his father was feeling like, but no sound — yes, but there was a sound, four sounds. Four separate notes of music, in an ascending scale, came to him, faint and monotonously repeated — la, la, la, la; la, la, la, la; la, la, la, la. Well, sooner or later perhaps this incredible nightmare would stop.
Mr. Coningsby had found himself cut off from Ralph with as much sudden expedition as Ralph had experienced. But, unlike his son, he did not feel the cloud that so surrounded and deprived him as being thickly material. It was an offence, certainly, but an offence of shocked bewilderment. It removed his world from him as it had removed Ralph’s and, like Ralph and the servants, he instinctively put out his hand to find companionship. He found — not companionship certainly, but what he had found before, another hand that laid hold of his, a strong, gentle, cold, strange hand. He pulled his own hastily back, and the other let it go. It had rather invited than constrained him, and it did not attempt to control. He rubbed his fingers together distastefully, and pretended that it might have been Joanna’s hand or Stephen’s. Anything else — it couldn’t be anything else. It might be Henry’s or Aaron’s — it might even have been Ralph’s. Only he was, in spite of himself, certain that it hadn’t been Ralph’s or Aaron’s or Henry’s, and, in spite of himself, he didn’t believe it to be Stephen’s or Joanna’s; it had been too cold and strong for any mortal hand. It was then — it wasn’t; certainly it wasn’t. Or if it was, then the only thing to be done was to keep out of the way of these released marionettes. “Robots!” Mr. Coningsby indignantly thought, though how the Robots had got from their table to the corridor he didn’t attempt to explain. He would get right out of the house — but the storm was outside. It cut him off from his home, from London, from trains and taxis; it shut him in and he must stay in. And within was the mist. There was, Mr. Coningsby realized, absolutely nowhere in the universe he could get to. He was there, and there he was going to stop.
Blundering along what he supposed to be the corridor, he exclaimed aloud, “Lunacy!” At the word all sorts of dim memories of his work awoke, only he seemed to be on the wrong side of them. He had never heard of a lunatic whose delusion was that a whirling snowstorm shut him up in a golden cloud, where cold hands touched his. Some lunatics were violent and had to be held down by others’ hands. What if he, struggling in his horror, became violent, and those hands held him? Suppose his mind was, by their judgements, mad? Lunacy — lunacy — what was lunacy? What was the mad mind wrestling with contemptuous and powerful enemies? What was he doing at the moment? If he should be caught and carried away for ever into the depths and distances which opened now and then before him — the mist falling away on either side and making a league-long valley of itself, or heaving up and leaving a great abyss round which it swirled and then covered it again. Borne into it . . . taking precedence, O, for ever and ever taking desolate and lunatic preference of the elder sons of younger sons of peers. They would always be behind him; they could never catch him up. As if bound upon a great wheel, spinning round, with lives bound to it — no wonder he was giddy; the mist or the wheel had made him so. That was why he saw the depths — as the wheel turned; it didn’t go quickly, but it was always revolving, and he had been on it for so long, so many years, and now he was old and sinking deeper and deeper down. But the elder sons would never catch him up; they were tied to it too.
His head was aching with the dizziness of the revolutions all the same; wheels within wheels — he had heard that phrase before. The mists were revolving round him or he in them: which — what — was it? Wheels within wheels — there had been some phrase of glory, angels or something, wheels full of eyes, cycles in cycles all vigilant and intelligent, revolving. These weren’t eyes; these were hands. Perhaps hands were eyes; if the eye of the body was dark, if the hand had no power — a vague wheel of innumerable hands all intertwined and clasped and turning, turning faster and faster, turning out of mud and into the mist, hands falling from it, helplessly clutching . . .
It was at this moment that Mr. Coningsby, blindly edging along the corridor, his own hands feeling nervously along the wall, touched a door-handle; he turned it, went in, found himself in his own room, still miraculously and mercifully free from mist, and slammed the door behind him. It was at the same moment that a voice within him said in tones of startled concern, “Nancy? Sybil?” If they were out there, as of course they were — he had seen Sybil in the hall when he was calling “Fire!” down the stairs. But Sybil — he knew it and admitted it at last — didn’t matter. In any unusual variation of normal things — snowstorms or shipwrecks or burning houses — he could have regarded himself as Sybil’s superior. But this was entire subversion of normal things, a new world, a world of lunacy, and he was not superior to her there. Confronted with any utterly new experience, he was her inferior, for he existed only in his relationships, and she — she existed in herself. There was certainly no point in his looking for Sybil.
All this he understood in a swift revelation; but he understood also that Nancy was different. Nancy was not merely his daughter — she was much more likely to find him useful than Sybil was. And he didn’t trust Henry to look after her; he had always thought that Henry was more concerned with himself than with Nancy. Poised three steps within the room, Mr. Coningsby turned round and looked unhappily at the closed door. Must he really go back into that mist on the chance of being useful to her? It seemed he must. “Blast!” Mr. Coningsby said aloud, in a rare explosion of disgust. Sybil, Ralph, Henry — any of these might be looking after her; yes, but he didn’t know they were. Besides, there was Joanna. His altruism excited into action by this opportune dislike (as so often happens: even love often owing more to hate than perfection of love could altogether approve), he went back to the door, and observed disagreeably that the golden cloud was beginning to ooze through it. He was past surprise by now; he didn’t even try to see that it was coming through the keyhole or anywhere except straight through the wood. There it was, growing thicker. In that case it was just as well that he’d already determined to leave the room, since things would soon be as bad within as without. Very well; only this time he must keep his head; he wouldn’t be any use to Nancy if he lost it. No nonsense about wheels or hands that were eyes or distances. This was a house; it had a fog in it; he was Lothair Coningsby, and he was going to find his daughter in case she was frightened by an ugly old woman. Very well. He opened the door.
Actually, when he had gone a little distance down the corridor, he thought the mist wasn’t too bad. He even ventured to open his mouth, and say in a curiously subdued voice, “Nancy!” He didn’t quite admit that he didn’t want any — anybody — anybody with inhuman hands to hear him, but he knew it would be very inconvenient if they did. But nothing at all happened, blessedly. So he took a few more steps and said “Nancy” again. This time another form stepped against his own — very nearly crashed into him — and a voice said, “She hasn’t come back then?”
Mr. Coningsby, recovering from a spasmodic fear that the new appearance might be one of the presences of the cloud, peering closer, saw that it was Henry, and his fear spoke angrily: “What d’ye mean — come back? Why aren’t you with her?”
“Because I can’t get there,” Henry said. “God only knows where she is, and if He does He knows why I’m not there.”
“Don’t stand there talking about God,” Mr. Coningsby snapped. “Tell me what devil’s trick you’ve played on her.”
“When I tried to kill you,” Henry began in a low, monotonous voice, as if he had often said it over to himself, “because I thought you stood in the way of the entrance into the —”
“When you what?” Mr. Coningsby cried out, “Tried to kill me? Are you mad? When did you try to kill me?” The nightmare was getting worse; he couldn’t really be standing in this accursed welter of golden cloud talking to his daughter’s lover of his own plotted murder. Had there been any trying to kill him? or had he been killed? and was this mist the ghostly consequence of death? He checked in time to hear Henry say:
“When I brought the storm out of the Tarots. I poured the waters on you out of their vessels and I beat the winds against you with the staffs because you wouldn’t give up the cards. But she went away to stop it.”
“Stop it!” Mr. Coningsby said, clutching at the first words he really understood. “I should think she would stop it! What under heaven are you talking about?” He peered closely at Henry’s face, and was struck silent by what he saw in eyes of which the brightness had been dulled. Pallid and fixed, the face looked back at him; mild and awful, the voice answered him, “I meant to use her, and now I can’t find her. She’s gone beyond me, and I can’t catch her up. You may.”
“I certainly will,” Mr. Coningsby said. “I— I— Where is she?”
“She’s gone into the dance,” Henry said, “and I don’t know whether even she can hold her post there. I was a fool once and dreamed, and I tried to kill you because you were in the way of my dreams.”
“You were a fool all right,” Mr. Coningsby said, “and if this utterly detestable nonsense you’re talking means anything, you were a great deal worse than a fool. Pull yourself . . . ”
Henry looked at him, and he stopped. No man with a face of that colour and of that agony would be talking nonsense — not if he knew it. If the storm had been — but storms weren’t! Nor, of course, was mist. Nancy was trying to stop the storm — he’d got that much — and she’d gone into the dance. That, whatever else it meant, meant those damned silly marionettes in their infernal black magic of a room — where Joanna had been going. He had known all the time that Joanna would be in it somehow.
He pushed past Henry, rather thankful even in his angry distraction to feel Henry’s undoubted body as he shoved it away, and said, “I’ll deal with you after. If you can’t find her, I will.”
Unexpectedly docile, Henry said: “You may. That may be the judgement. Do it; do it, if only you can.”
Mr. Coningsby had gone on several paces when he, without quite knowing why, looked back over his shoulder. It was a silly thing to do, he knew, with this God-forsaken mist all round him and when he had done it he knew it all the more. For looking back was like seeing things reversed; he was looking back in two ways at once. He saw Henry, but he saw him upside down — a horrible idea. Nevertheless, there it was: Henry was, in the ridiculous reflections of the mist, hanging in the void, his head downwards; his hands out ............