“Very good,” answered several voices. Jane found herself left alone in the kitchen with Mrs. Maggs and the animals and MacPhee and the Director.

“You are all right, child?” said Ransom.

“I think so, sir,” said Jane. Her actual state of mind was one she could not analyse. Her expectation was strung up to the height; something that would have been terror but for the joy, and joy but for the terror, possessed her-an all-absorbing tension of excitement and obedience. Everything else in her life seemed small and commonplace compared with this moment.

“Do you place yourself in the obedience,” said the Director, “in obedience to Maleldil?”

“Sir,” said Jane, “I know nothing of Maleldil. But I place myself in obedience to you.”

“It is enough for the present,” said the Director. “This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for to-night, it is enough.”

“This is the craziest business that ever I heard of,” said MacPhee.

Eleven

I

“I can’t see a thing,” said Jane.

“This rain is spoiling the whole plan,” said Dimble from the back seat. “Is this still Eaton Road, Arthur?”

“I think . . . yes, there’s the toll-house,” said Denniston who was driving.

“But what’s the use?” said Jane. “I can’t see, even with the window down. We might have passed it any number of times. The only thing is to get out and walk.”

“I think she’s right, sir,” said Denniston.

“I say!” said Jane suddenly. “Look! Look! What’s that? Stop.”

“I can’t see a white gate,” said Denniston.

“Oh, it’s not that,” said Jane. “Look over there.”

“I can’t see anything,” said Dimble.

“Do you mean that light?” said Denniston.

“Yes, of course, that’s the fire.”

“What fire?”

“It’s the light,” she said, “the fire in the hollow in the little wood. I’d forgotten all about it. Yes, I know: I never told Grace, or the Director. I’d forgotten that part of the dream till this moment. That was how it ended. It was the most important part really. That was where I found him-Merlin, you know. Sitting by a fire in a little wood. After I came out of the place underground. Oh, come quickly!”

“What do you think, Arthur?” said Dimble.

“I think we must go wherever Jane leads,” answered Denniston.

“Oh, do hurry,” said Jane. “There’s a gate here. Quick! It’s only one field away.”

All three of them crossed the road and opened the gate and went into the field. Dimble said nothing. He was inwardly reeling under the shock and shame of the immense and sickening fear which had surged up inside him. He had, perhaps, a clearer idea than the others of what sort of things might happen when they reached the place.

Jane, as guide, went first, and Denniston beside her, giving her his arm and showing an occasional gleam of his torch on the rough ground. Dimble brought up the rear. No one was inclined to speak.

The change from the road to the field was as if one had passed from a waking into a phantasmal world. Everything became darker, wetter, more incalculable. Each small descent felt as if you might be coming to the edge of a precipice. They were following a track beside a hedge; wet and prickly tentacles seemed to snatch at them as they went. Whenever Denniston used his torch, the things that appeared within the circle of its light-tufts of grass, ruts filled with water, draggled yellow leaves clinging to the wet blackness of many-angled twigs, and once the two greenish-yellow fires in the eyes of some small animal-had the air of being more commonplace than they ought to have been; as if, for that moment’s exposure they had assumed a disguise which they would shuffle off again the moment they were left alone. They looked curiously small, too; when the light vanished, the cold, noisy darkness seemed a huge thing.

The fear which Dimble had felt from the first began to trickle into the minds of the others as they proceeded-like water coming into a ship from a slow leak. They realised that they had not really believed in Merlin till now. They had thought they were believing the Director in the kitchen; but they had been mistaken. The shock was still to take. Out here, with only the changing red light ahead and the black all round, one really began to accept as fact this tryst with something dead and yet not dead, something dug up, exhumed, from that dark pit of history which lies between the ancient Romans and the beginning of the English. “The Dark Ages” thought Dimble; how lightly one had read and written those words. But now they were going to step right into that Darkness. It was an age, not a man, that awaited them in the horrible little dingle.

And suddenly all that Britain which had been so long familiar to him as a scholar rose up like a solid thing. He could see it all. Little dwindling cities where the light of Rome still rested-little Christian sites, Camalodunum, Kaerleon, Glastonbury-a church, a villa or two, a huddle of houses, an earthwork. And then, beginning scarcely a stone’s-throw beyond the gates, the wet tangled, endless woods, silted with the accumulated decay of autumns that had been dropping leaves since before Britain was an island; wolves slinking, beavers building, wide shallow marshes, dim horns and drummings, eyes in the thickets, eyes of men not only Pre-Roman but Pre-British, ancient creatures, unhappy and dispossessed, who became the elves and ogres and wood-wooses of the later tradition. But worse than the forests, the clearings. Little strongholds with unheard-of kings. Little colleges and covines of Druids. Houses whose mortar had been ritually mixed with babies’ blood. They had tried to do that to Merlin. And now all that age, horribly dislocated, wrenched out of its place in the time series and forced to come back and go through all its motions yet again with doubled monstrosity, was flowing towards them and would, in a few minutes, receive them into itself.

Then came a check. They had walked right into a hedge. They wasted a minute, with the aid of the torch disentangling Jane’s hair. They had come to the end of a field. The light of the fire, which kept on growing stronger and weaker in fitful alternations, was hardly visible from here. There was nothing for it but to set to work and find a gap or a gate. They went a long way out of their course before they found one. It was a gate that would not open: and as the came down on the far side, after climbing it, they went ankle-deep into water. For a few minutes, plodding slightly uphill, they were out of sight of the fire and when it reappeared it was well away on their left and much farther off than any one had supposed.

Hitherto Jane had scarcely attempted to think of what might lie before them. As they went on, the real meaning of that scene in the kitchen began to dawn on her. He had sent the men to bid good-bye to their wives. He had blessed them all. It was likely, then, that this-this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field-meant death. Death-the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point. Jane was trying to see death in the new light of all she had heard since she left Edgestow. She had long ceased to feel any resentment at the Director’s tendency, as it were, to dispose of her-to give her, at one time or in one sense, to Mark, and in another to Maleldil; never, in any sense, to keep her for himself. She accepted that. And of Mark she did not think much, because to think of him increasingly aroused feelings of pity and guilt. But Maleldil. Up till now she had not thought of Maleldil either. She did not doubt that the eldils existed; nor did she doubt the existence of this stronger and more obscure being whom they obeyed . . . whom the Director obeyed, and through him the whole household, even MacPhee. If it had ever occurred to her to question whether all these things might be the reality behind what she had been taught at school as “religion,” she had put the thought aside. The distance between these alarming and operative realities and the memory, say, of fat Mrs. Dimble saying her prayers, was too wide. The things belonged, for her, to different worlds. On the one hand, terror of dreams, rapture of obedience, the tingling light and sound from under the Director’s door, and the great struggle against an imminent danger; on the other, the smell of pews, horrible lithographs of the Saviour (apparently seven feet high, with the face of a consumptive girl), the embarrassment of confirmation classes, the nervous affability of clergymen. But this time, if it was really to be death, the thought would not be put aside. Because, really, it now appeared that almost anything might be true. The world had already turned out to be so very unlike what she had expected. The old ring-fence had been smashed completely. One might be in for anything. Maleldil might be, quite simply and crudely, God. There might be a life after death: a Heaven: a Hell. The thought glowed in her mind for a second like a spark that has fallen on shavings, and then a second later, like those shavings, her whole mind was in a blaze-or with just enough left outside the blaze to utter some kind of protest. “But . . . this is unbearable. I ought to have been told.” It did not, at that moment, occur to her even to doubt that if such things existed they would be totally and unchangeably adverse to her.