He had come to a halt in a valley filled with mounds. Fuchsia was holding his hand. The crowd was all about him. A figure in a hood was scattering red dust into a little trench. A voice was intoning. The words meant nothing to him. He was adrift.
That same evening, Titus lay wide-eyed in the darkness and stared with unseeing eyes at the enormous shadows of two boys as they fought a mock battle of grotesque dimensions upon an oblong of light cast upon the dormitory wall. And while he gazed abstractedly at the cut and thrust of the shadow-monsters, his sister Fuchsia was crossing to the Doctor's house.
'Can I talk to you, Doctor?' she asked as he opened the door to her. 'I know it isn't long since you had to bear with me, and...' but Prunesquallor, putting his finger to his lips, silenced her and then drew her back into a shadow of the hall, for Irma was opening the door of the sitting-room.
'Alfred,' came the cry, 'what 'is' it, Alfred? I said what 'is' it?'
'The merest nothing, my love,' trilled the Doctor. 'I must get that hank of ivy torn up by its very roots in the morning.'
'What ivy - I said what ivy, you irritating thing,' she answered. 'I sometimes wish that you could call a spade a spade, I really do.'
'Have we one, sweet nicotine?'
'Have we what?'
'A spade, for the ivy, my love, the ivy that 'will' keep tapping at our front door. By all that's symbolic, it 'will' go on doing it!'
'Is that what it was?'
Irma relaxed. 'I don't remember any ivy,' she added. 'But what are you cowering in that corner for? It's not like you, Alfred, to lurk about in the corner like that. Really, if I didn't know it was you, well really, I'd be quite...'
'But you're 'not', are you, my sweet nerve-ending? Of course you're not. So upstairs with you. By all that moves in rapid circles, I've had a seismic sister these last few days, haven't I?'
'O Alfred. It 'will' be worth it, won't it? There's so much to think of and I'm so excited. And so soon now. 'Our' party! 'Our' party!'
'And that's why you must go to bed and fill yourself right up with sleep. That is what my sister needs, isn't it? Of course it is. Sleep... O, the very treacle of it, Irma! So run away my dear. Away with you! Away with you! A... w... a... y!' He fluttered his hand like a silk handkerchief.
'Good night, Alfred.'
'Good night, O thicker-than-water: Irma disappeared into the upper darkness.
'And now,' said the Doctor, placing his immaculate hands on his brittle and elegant knees, and rising at the same time on his toes, so that Fuchsia had the strongest impression that he was about to fall forwards on his speculative and smiling face... 'and now, my Fuchsia, I think we've had enough of the hall, don't you?' and he led the girl into his study.
'Now if you'll draw the blinds and if I pull up that green arm-chair, we will be comfortable, affable, incredible and almost insufferable in two shakes of a lamb's tail, won't we?' he said. 'By all that's unanswerable, we will!'
Fuchsia, pulling at the curtain, felt something give way and a loose sail of velvet hung across the glass.
'O Doctor Prune I'm sorry - I'm sorry,' she said, almost in tears.
'Sorry! Sorry!' cried the Doctor. 'How dare you pity me! How dare you humiliate me! You know very well that I can do that sort of thing better than you. I'm an old man; I admit it. Nearly fifty summers have seeped through me. But there's life in me yet. But 'you' don't think so. No! By all that's cruel, you don't. But I'll show you. Catch me.' And the Doctor striding like a heron to a further window ripped the long curtain from its runner, and whirling it round himself stood swathed before her like a long green chrysalis, with the pale sharp eager features of his bright face emerging at the top like something from another life.
'There!' he said.
A year ago Fuchsia would have laughed until her sides were sore. Even at the moment it was wonderfully funny. But she couldn't laugh. She knew that he loved doing such a thing. She knew he loved to put her at her ease - and she 'had' been put at her ease, for she no longer felt embarrassed, but she also knew that she should be laughing, and she couldn't feel the humour, she could only know it. For within the last year she had developed, not naturally, but on a zig-zag course. The emotions and the tags of half-knowledge which came to her, fought and jostled, upsetting one another, so that what was natural to her appeared un-natural, and she lived from minute to minute, grappling with each like a lost explorer in a dream who is now in the arctic, now on the equator, now upon rapids, and now alone on endless tracts of sand.
'O Doctor,' she said, 'thank you. That is very, very kind and funny.'
She had turned her head away, but now she looked up and found he had already disengaged himself of the curtain and was pushing a chair towards her. 'What is worrying you, Fuchsia?' he said. They were both sitting down. The dark night stared in at them through the curtainless windows.
She leant forwards and as she did so she suddenly looked older. It was as though she had taken a grip of her mind - to have, in a way, grown up to the span of her nineteen years.
'Several important things, Doctor Prune,' she said. 'I want to ask you about them... if I may.'
Prunesquallor looked up sharply. This was a new Fuchsia. Her tone had been perfectly level. Perfectly adult.
'Of course you may, Fuchsia. What are they?'
'The first thing is, what happened to my father, Dr Prune?'
The Doctor leaned back in his chair, as she stared at him he put his hand to his forehead.
