But why? What conceivable danger could there be here? Here in the house of his friends? At least—well, yes, there was that kind of danger. He looked at Claire Trent—her whiteness, her slenderness, the exquisite droop of her golden head. But that danger had been there for some time—it was never likely to get acute. For Jack Trent was his best friend, and more than his best friend, the man who had saved his life in Flanders and had been recommended for the VC for doing so. A good fellow, Jack, one of the best. Damned bad luck that he should have fallen in love with Jack’s wife. He’d get over it some day, he supposed. A thing couldn’t go on hurting like this for ever. One could starve it out—that was it, starve it out. It was not as though she would ever guess—and if she did guess, there was no danger of her caring. A statue, a beautiful statue, a thing of gold and ivory and pale pink coral … a toy for a king, not a real woman …
Claire … the very thought of her name, uttered silently, hurt him … He must get over it. He’d cared for women before … ‘But not like this!’ said something. ‘Not like this.’ Well, there it was. No danger there—heartache, yes, but not danger. Not the danger of the Red Signal. That was for something else.
He looked round the table and it struck him for the first time that it was rather an unusual little gathering. His uncle, for instance, seldom dined out in this small, informal way. It was not as though the Trents were old friends; until this evening Dermot had not been aware that he knew them at all.
To be sure, there was an excuse. A rather notorious medium was coming after dinner to give a séance. Sir Alington professed to be mildly interested in spiritualism. Yes, that was an excuse, certainly.
The word forced itself on his notice. An excuse. Was the séance just an excuse to make the specialist’s presence at dinner natural? If so, what was the real object of his being here? A host of details came rushing into Dermot’s mind, trifles unnoticed at the time, or, as his uncle would have said, unnoticed by the conscious mind.
The great physician had looked oddly, very oddly, at Claire more than once. He seemed to be watching her. She was uneasy under his scrutiny. She made little twitching motions with her hands. She was nervous, horribly nervous, and was it, could it be, frightened? Why was she frightened?
With a jerk, he came back to the conversation round the table. Mrs Eversleigh had got the great man talking upon his own subject.
‘My dear lady,’ he was saying, ‘what is madness? I can assure you that the more we study the subject, the more difficult we find it to pronounce. We all practise a certain amount of self-deception, and when we carry it so far as to believe we are the Czar of Russia, we are shut up or restrained. But there is a long road before we reach that point. At what particular spot on it shall we erect a post and say, “On this side sanity, on the other madness?” It can’t be done, you know. And I will tell you this, if the man suffering from a delusion happened to hold his tongue about it, in all probability we should never be able to distinguish him from a normal individual. The extraordinary sanity of the insane is a most interesting subject.’
Sir Alington sipped his wine with appreciation, and beamed upon the company.
‘I’ve always heard they are very cunning,’ remarked Mrs Eversleigh. ‘Loonies, I mean.’
‘Remarkably so. And suppression of one’s particular delusion has a disastrous effect very often. All suppressions are dangerous, as psychoanalysis has taught us. The man who has a harmless eccentricity, and can indulge it as such, seldom goes over the border line. But the man’—he paused—‘or woman who is to all appearance perfectly normal may be in reality a poignant source of danger to the community.’
His gaze travelled gently down the table to Claire, and then back again. He sipped his wine once more.
A horrible fear shook Dermot. Was that what he meant? Was that what he was driving at? Impossible, but—
‘And all from suppressing oneself,’ sighed Mrs Eversleigh. ‘I quite see that one should be very careful always to—to express one’s personality. The dangers of the other are frightful.’
‘My dear Mrs Eversleigh,’ expostulated the physician. ‘You have quite misunderstood me. The cause of the mischief is in the physical matter of the brain—sometimes arising from some outward agency such as a blow; sometimes, alas, congenital.’
‘Heredity is so sad,’ sighed the lady vaguely. ‘Consumption and all that.’
‘Tuberculosis is not hereditary,’ said Sir Alington drily.
‘Isn’t it? I always thought it was. But madness is! How dreadful. What else?’
‘Gout,’ said Sir Alington smiling. ‘And colour blindness—the latter is rather interesting. It is transmitted direct to males, but is latent in females. So, while there are many colour-blind men, for a woman to be colour-blind, it must have been latent in her mother as well as present in her father—rather an unusual state of things to occur. That is what is called sex-limited heredity.’
‘How interesting. But madness is not like that, is it?’
‘Madness can be handed down to men or women equally,’ said the physician gravely.
Claire rose suddenly, pushing back her chair so abruptly that it overturned and fell to the ground. She was very pale and the nervous motions of her fingers were very apparent.
‘You—you will not be long, will you?’ she begged. ‘Mrs Thompson will be here in a few minutes now.’
‘One glass of port, and I will be with you, for one,’ declared Sir Alington. ‘To see this wonderful Mrs Thompson’s performance is what I have come for, is it not? Ha, ha! Not that I needed any inducement.’ He bowed.
Claire gave a faint smile of acknowledgment and passed out of the room, her hand on Mrs Eversleigh’s shoulder.
‘Afraid I’ve been talking shop,’ remarked the physician as he resumed his seat. ‘Forgive me, my dear fellow.’
‘Not at all,’ said Trent perfunctorily.
He looked strained and worried. For the first time Dermot felt an outsider in the company of his friend. Between these two was a secret that even an old friend might not share. And yet the whole thing was fantastic and incredible. What had he to go upon? Nothing but a couple of glances and a woman’s nervousness.
They lingered over their wine but a very short time, and arrived up in the drawing-room just as Mrs Thompson was announced.
The medium was a plump middle-aged woman, atrociously dressed in magenta velvet, with a loud rather common voice.
‘Hope I’m not late, Mrs Trent,’ she said cheerily. ‘You did say nine o’clock, didn’t you?’
‘You are quite punctual, Mrs Thompson,’ said Claire in her sweet, slightly husky voice. ‘This is our little circle.’
No further introductions were made, as was evidently the custom. The medium swept them all with a shrewd, penetrating eye.
‘I hope we shall get some good results,’ she remarked briskly. ‘I can’t tell you how I hate it when I go out and I can’t give satisfaction, so to speak. It just makes me mad. But I think Shiromako (my Japanese control, you know) will be able to get through all right tonight. I’m feeling ever so fit, and I refused the welsh rabbit, fond of toasted cheese though I am.’
Dermot listened, half amused, half disgusted. How prosaic the whole thing was! And yet, was he not judging foolishly? Everything, after all, was natural—the powers claimed by mediums were natural powers, as yet imperfectly understood. A great surgeon might be wary of indigestion on the eve of a delicate operation. Why not Mrs Thompson?
Chairs were arranged in a circle, lights so that they could conveniently be raised or lowered. Dermot noticed that there was no question of tests, or of Sir Alington satisfying himself as to the conditions