however, both women seemed to make an effort, and brightened up somewhat, and could even laugh at times.
The recovery continued, and Bill and Will deemed it safe to return to their daily work in the lab, completing the atom-harnessing machine. One day Will happened to return to the house unexpectedly, and found the two women in each other’s arms on a couch, crying their eyes out. He stood staring for a moment. They suddenly became aware of him, and parted, drying their eyes.
“What’s up, Will? Why have you come back?” asked Joan, unsteadily, sniffing.
“Er—to get my slide-rule: I’d forgotten it,” he said. “Bill wanted to trust his memory, but I think there’s something wrong with his figures. I want to check up before we test the machine further. But—what’s the matter with you two?”
“Oh, we’re all right,” said Doll, strainedly and not very convincingly. She blew her nose, and endeavoured to pull herself together. But almost immediately she was overtaken by another burst of weeping, and Joan put her arms around her comfortingly.
“Look here,” said Will, in sudden and unusual exasperation, “I’ve had about enough of this. You know what Bill and I are only too willing to deal with whatever you’re worrying about. Yet the pair of you won’t say a word—only cry and fret. How can we help if you won’t tell us? Do you think we like to see you going on like this?”
“I’ll tell you, Will,” said Joan quietly.
Doll emitted a muffled “No!” but Joan ignored her, and went on: “Don’t you see that Bill has created another me in
And because Doll thinks and feels exactly as I do, she’s in love with you! She has been that way from the very beginning. All this time she’s been trying to conquer it, to suppress it, and make Bill happy instead.”
Doll’s shoulders shook with the intensity of her sobbing. Will laid his hands gently on them, consolingly. He could think of nothing whatever to say. He had not even dreamt of such a situation, obvious as it appeared now.
“Do you wonder the conflict got her down?” said Joan. “Poor girl! I brought her here to be nearer to you, and that eased things for her.”
“But it didn’t for you,” said Will, quietly, looking straight at her. “I see now why you began to worry. Why didn’t you tell me then, Joan?”
“How could I?”
He bit his lip, paced nervously over to the window, and stood with his back to the pair on the couch.
“What a position!” he thought. “What can we do? Poor Bill!”
He wondered how he could break the sorry news to his best friend, and even as he wondered, the problem was solved for him.
From the window there was a view down the length of the wide, shallow valley, and a couple miles away the white concrete laboratory could just be seen nestling at the foot of one of the farther slopes. There were fields all around it, and a long row of great sturdy oak trees started from its northern corner. From this height and distance the whole place looked like a table-top model. Will stared moodily at that little white box where Bill was, and tried to clarify his chaotic thoughts.
And suddenly, incredibly, before his eyes the distant white box spurted up in a dusty cloud of chalk-powder, and ere a particle of it had neared its topmost height, the whole of that part of the valley was split across by a curtain of searing, glaring flame. The whole string of oak trees, tough and amazingly deep-rooted though they were, floated up through the air like feathers of windblown thistledown before the blast of that mighty eruption.
The glaring flame vanished suddenly, like a light that had been turned out, and left a thick, brown, heaving fog in its place, a cloud of earth that had been pulverised. Will caught a glimpse of the torn oak trees falling back into this brown, rolling cloud, and then the blast wave, which had travelled up the valley, smote the house. The window was instantly shattered and blown in, and he went flying backwards in a shower of glass fragments. He hit the floor awkwardly, and sprawled there, and only then did his laggard brain realise what had happened. Bill’s habitual impatience had at last been his undoing. He had refused to wait any longer for Will’s return, and gone on with the test, trusting to his memory. And he had been wrong.
The harness had slipped.
A man sat on a hill with a wide and lovely view of the country, bright in summer sunshine, spread before him. The rich green squares of the fields, the white ribbons of the lanes, the yellow blocks of haystacks and grey spires of village churches, made up a pattern infinitely pleasing to the eye.
And the bees hummed drowsily, nearby sheep and cattle made the noises of their kind, and a neighbouring thicket fairly rang with the unending chorus of a hundred birds.
But all this might as well have been set on another planet, for the man could neither see nor hear the happy
