crests wavered whitely through the smoke which lay between his hands and his head.
The blood began to beat a tattoo at his temples, and upon his high white brow a few big beads gathered.
He was biting at his lower lip, and his eyebrows were drawn down over his eyes as though he were cogitating upon some academic problem. He knew that no one could see him, for by now the smoke was all but opaque, but he was watching himself. He could see that the position of his arms, and the whole attitude of his body was exaggerated and stiffened. He discovered that his fingers were splayed out in a histrionic gesture of alarm. It was for him to control his members before he could hope to organize the activities in the smoke-filled room. And so he watched and waited for the moment to assert himself, and as he watched he found himself struggling. There was blood on his tongue. He had bitten his wrist. His hands were now grappling with one another and it seemed an eternity before the fingers ceased their deadly, interlocked and fratricidal strangling. Yet his panic could have taken no longer than a few moments, for the echo of Irma’s scream was still in his ears when he began to loosen his hands.
Meanwhile Prunesquallor had reached his sister’s side and had found her bridling her body up in preparation for another scream. Prunesquallor, as urbane as ever, had nevertheless something in his fish-like eyes that might almost be described as determination. One glance at his sister was sufficient to make him realize that to attempt to reason with her would be about as fruitful as to try to christianize a vulture. She was on tip-toe and her lungs were expanded when he struck her across her long white face with his long white hand, the pent breath from her lungs issuing from her mouth, ears and nostrils. There was something of shingle in the sound – of shingle dragged seawards on a dark night.
Dragging her across the room swiftly, her heels scraping the floor, he found a chair, after probing around in the smoke with his delicate feet, and sat his sister in it.
‘Irma!’ he shouted into her ear, ‘my humiliating and entirely unfortunate old string of whitewash, sit where you are! Alfred will do the rest. Can you hear me? Be good now! blood of my blood, be good now, damn you!’
Irma sat quite still as though dead, save for a look of profound wonder in her eyes.
Prunesquallor was on the point of making another effort to locate the origin of the smoke when he heard Fuchsia’s voice high above the coughing that by now was a constant background of noise in the library.
‘Dr Prune! Dr Prune! quickly! Quickly, Dr Prune!’
The Doctor pulled down his cuffs smartly over his wrists, tried to square his shoulders, but met with no success, and then began to pick his way, half running, half walking, towards the door where Fuchsia, Mrs Slagg and Titus had been last seen. When he judged he was about halfway to the door and was clear of the furniture, Prunesquallor began to accelerate his speed. This he did by increasing not only the length of his stride but the height also, so that he was, as it were, prancing through the air, when he was brought to a sudden ruthless halt by a collision with something that felt like an enormous bolster on end.
When he had drawn his face away from the tallow smelling draperies that seemed to hang about him like curtains, he stretched out his hand tentatively and shuddered to feel it come in contact with large fingers.
‘’Squallor?’ came the enormous voice. ‘Is that ’Squallor?’ The mouth of the Countess was opening and shutting within an inch of his left ear.
The Doctor gesticulated eloquently, but his artistry was wasted in the smoke.
‘It
‘Where’s Fuchsia?’ said the Countess. Prunesquallor found that his shoulder was being gripped.
‘By the door,’ said the Doctor, longing to free himself from the weight of her Ladyship’s hand, and wondering, even in the middle of the coughing and the darkness, what on earth the material that fitted around his shoulders so elegantly would look like when the Countess had finished with it. ‘I was on the point of finding her when we met, ha, ha! met, as it were, so palpably, so inevitably.’
‘Quiet, man! quiet!’ said Lady Gertrude, loosening her grasp.
‘Find her for me. Bring her here – and smash a window, ’Squallor, smash a window.’
The Doctor was gone from her in a flash and when he judged himself to be a few feet from the door – ‘Are you there, Fuchsia?’ he trilled.
Fuchsia was just below him, and he was startled to hear her voice come up jerkily through the smoke.
‘She’s ill. Very ill. Quick, Dr Prune, quick! Do something for her.’ The Doctor felt his knees being clutched. ‘She’s down here, Dr Prune. I’m holding her.’
Prunesquallor hitched up his trousers and knelt down at once.
There seemed to be more vibration in the atmosphere in this part of the room, more than could be accounted for by any modicum of air that might have been entering through the keyhole. The coughing was dreadful to hear; Fuchsia’s was heavy and breathless; but the thin, weak, and ceaseless coughing of Mrs Slagg gave the Doctor the more concern. He felt for the old nurse and found her in Fuchsia’s lap. Slipping his hand across her little chicken bosom he found that her heart was the merest flutter. To his left in the darkness there was a mouldy smell, and then the driest series of brick-dust coughs he had ever heard revealed the proximity of Flay, who was fanning the air mechanically with a large book he had clawed out of a nearby shelf. The fissure left in the row of hidden books had filled immediately with the coiling smoke – a tall, narrow niche of choking darkness, a ghastly gap in a row of leather wisdom teeth.
‘Flay,’ said the Doctor, ‘can you hear me, Flay? Where’s the largest window in the room, my man? Quickly now, where is it?’
‘North wall,’ said Flay. ‘High up.’
‘Go and shatter it at once. At once.’
‘No balcony there,’ said Flay. ‘Can’t reach.’
‘Don’t argue! Use what you’ve got in that head of yours. You know the room. Find a missile, my good Flay – find a missile, and break a window. Some oxygen for Mrs Slagg. Don’t you think so? By all the zephyrs, yes! Go and help him, Fuchsia. Find where the window is and break it, even if you have to throw Irma at it, ha, ha, ha! And don’t be alarmed. Smoke, you know, is only smoke: it’s not composed of crocodiles, oh dear no, nothing so tropical. Hurry
