To-day, this unrest was upon him in an unusual degree. He was missing Ivy Maggs. He did not know that there was any such person and he did not remember her as we know remembering, but there was an unspecified lack in his experience. She and the Director were, in their different ways, the two main factors in his existence. He felt, in his own fashion, the supremacy of the Director. Meetings with him were to the bear what mystical experiences are to men, for the Director had brought back with him from Venus some shadow of man’s lost prerogative to ennoble beasts. In his presence Mr. Bultitude trembled on the very borders of personality, thought the unthinkable and did the impossible, was troubled and enraptured with gleams from beyond his own woolly world, and came away tired. But with Ivy he was perfectly at home—as a savage who believes in some remote High God is more at home with the little deities of wood and water. It was Ivy who fed him, chased him out of forbidden places, cuffed him, and talked to him all day long. It was her firm conviction that the creature “understood every word she said.” If you took this literally it was untrue; but in another sense it was not so wide of the mark. For much of Ivy’s conversation was the expression not of thought but of feeling, and of feelings Mr. Bultitude almost shared—feelings of alacrity, snugness, and physical affection. In their own way they understood one another pretty well.
Three times Mr. Bultitude turned away from the tree and the wall, but each time he came back. Then, very cautiously and quietly, he began to climb the tree. When he got up into the fork he sat there for a long time. He saw beneath him a steep grassy bank descending to a road. The desire and the inhibition were now both very strong. He sat there for nearly half an hour. Sometimes his mind wandered from the point and once he nearly went to sleep. In the end he got down on the outside of the wall. When he found that the thing had really happened he became so frightened that he sat still at the bottom of the grassy bank on the very edge of the road. Then he heard a noise.
A motor van came into sight. It was driven by a man in the livery of the N.I.C.E. and another man in the same livery sat beside him.
“Hullo . . . I say!” said the second man. “Pull up, Sid. What about that?”
“What?” said the driver.
“Haven’t you got eyes in your head?” said the other.
“Gor,” said Sid, pulling up. “A bloody great bear. I say—it couldn’t be our own bear, could it?”
“Get on,” said his mate. “She was in her cage all right this morning.”
“You don’t think she could have done a bunk? There’d be hell to pay for you and me. . . .”
“She couldn’t have got here if she had done a bunk. Bears don’t go forty miles an hour. That ain’t the point. But hadn’t we better pinch this one?”
“We haven’t got no orders,” said Sid.
“No. And we haven’t failed to get that blasted wolf either, have we?”
“Wasn’t our fault. The old woman what said she’d sell wouldn’t sell, as you’re there to witness, young Len. We did our best. Told her that experiments at Belbury weren’t what she thought. Told her the brute would have the time of its life and be made no end of a pet. Never told so many lies in one morning in my life. She’d been got at by someone.”
“Course it wasn’t our fault. But the boss won’t take no notice of that. It’s get on or get out at Belbury.”
“Get out?” said Sid. “I wish to hell I knew how to.”
Len spat over the side and there was a moment’s silence.
“Anyway,” said Sid presently, “what’s the good of taking a bear back?”
“Well, isn’t it better than coming back with nothing?” said Len. “And bears cost money. I know they want another one. And here it is free.”
“All right,” said Sid ironically, “if you’re so keen on it, just hop out and ask him to step in.”
“Dope,” said Len.
“Not on my bit of dinner, you don’t,” said Sid.
“You’re a bucking good mate to have,” said Len, groping in a greasy parcel. “It’s a good thing for you I’m not the sort of chap who’d split on you.”
“You done it already,” said the driver. “I know all your little games.”
Len had by this time produced a thick sandwich and was dabbing it with some strong-smelling liquid from a bottle. When it was thoroughly saturated, he opened the door and went a pace forward, still holding the door in one hand. He was now about six yards from the bear, which had remained perfectly still ever since it saw them. He threw the sandwich to it.
Quarter of an hour later Mr. Bultitude lay on his side, unconscious and breathing heavily. They had no difficulty in tying up his mouth and all four paws, but they had great difficulty in lifting him into the van.
“That’s done something to my ticker,” said Sid, pressing his hand to his left side.
“Curse your ticker,” said Len, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes. “Come on.”
Sid climbed back into the driving seat, sat still for a few seconds, panting and muttering “Christ” at intervals. Then he started his engine up and they drove away.
IV
For some time now Mark’s waking life was divided between periods by the Sleeper’s bedside and periods in the room with the spotted ceiling. The training in objectivity which took place in the latter cannot be described fully. The reversal of natural inclination which Frost inculcated was not spectacular or dramatic, but the details would be unprintable and had, indeed, a kind of nursery fatuity about them which is best ignored. Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing: but laughter was unhappily out of the question. There indeed lay the horror—to perform petty obscenities which a very silly child might have thought funny all under the unchangingly serious inspection of Frost, with a stop watch and a note-book and all the ritual of scientific experiment. Some of the things he had to do were merely meaningless. In one exercise he had to mount the step-ladder and touch some one spot on the ceiling, selected by Frost: just touch it with his forefinger and then come down again. But either by association with the other exercises or because it really concealed some significance, this proceeding always appeared to Mark to be the most indecent and even inhuman of all his tasks. And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it became a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one’s own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him—something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.
The other thing that helped to save him was