Chapter 14: "Free! but a Monster!"

The peculiar ability of the human mind to slip so readily into the refuge of the commonplace after, or even during, some well-nigh intolerable crisis, has been to me long one of the most interesting phenomena of our psychology.

It is instinctively a protective habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective coloration--the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly developed in the late war.

Like the animals of the wild, the mind of man moves through a jungle--the jungle of life, passing along paths beaten out by the thought of his countless forefathers in their progress from birth to death.

And these paths are bordered and screened, figuratively and literally, with bush and trees of his own selection, setting out and cultivation--shelters of the familiar, the habitual, the customary.

On these ancestral paths, within these barriers of usage, man moves hidden and secure as the animals in their haunts--or so he thinks.

Outside them lie the wildernesses and the gardens of the unknown, and man’s little trails are but rabbit-runs in an illimitable forest.

But they are home to him!

Therefore it is that he scurries from some open place of revelation, some storm of emotion, some strength-testing struggle, back into the shelter of the obvious; finding it an intellectual environment that demands no slightest expenditure of mental energy or initiative, strength to sally forth again into the unfamiliar.

I crave pardon for this digression. I set it down because now I remember how, when Drake at last broke the silence that had closed in upon the passing of that still, small voice the essence of these thoughts occurred to me.

He strode over to the weeping girl, and in his voice was a roughness that angered me until I realized his purpose.

“Get up, Ruth,” he ordered. “He came back once and he’ll come back again. Now let him be and help us get a meal together. I’m hungry.”

She looked up at him, incredulously, indignation rising.

“Eat!” she exclaimed. “You can be hungry?”

“You bet I can--and I am,” he answered cheerfully. “Come on; we’ve got to make the best of it.”

“Ruth,” I broke in gently, “we’ll all have to think about ourselves a little if we’re to be of any use to him. You must eat--and then rest.”

“No use crying in the milk even if it’s spilt,” observed Drake, even more cheerfully brutal. “I learned that at the front where we got so we’d yelp for food even when the lads who’d been bringing it were all mixed up in it.”

She lifted Ventnor’s head from her lap, rested it on the silks; arose, eyes wrathful, her little hands closed in fists as though to strike him.

“Oh--you brute!” she whispered. “And I thought--I thought--Oh, I hate you!”

“That’s better,” said Dick. “Go ahead and hit me if you want. The madder you get the better you’ll feel.”

For a moment I thought she was going to take him at his word; then her anger fled.

“Thanks--Dick,” she said quietly.

And while I sat studying Ventnor, they put together a meal from the stores, brewed tea over the spirit-lamp with water from the bubbling spring. In these commonplaces I knew that she at least was finding relief from that strain of the abnormal under which we had labored so long. To my surprise I found that I was hungry, and with deep relief I watched Ruth partake of food and drink even though lightly.

About her seemed to hover something of the ethereal, elusive, and disquieting. Was it the strangely pellucid light that gave the effect, I wondered; and knew it was not, for as I scanned her covertly, there fell upon her face that shadow of inhuman tranquillity, of unearthly withdrawal which, I guessed, had more than anything else maddened Ventnor into his attack upon the Disk.

I watched her fight against it, drive it back. White lipped, she raised her head and met my gaze. And in her eyes I read both terror and--shame.

It came to me that painful as it might be for her the time for questioning had come.

“Ruth,” I said, “I know it’s not necessary to remind you that we’re in a tight place. Every fact and every scrap of knowledge that we can lay hold of is of the utmost importance in enabling us to determine our course.

“I’m going to repeat your brother’s question--what did Norhala do to you? And what happened when you were floating before the Disk?”

The blaze of interest in Drake’s eyes at these questions changed to amazement at her stricken recoil from them.

“There was nothing,” she whispered--then defiantly--”nothing. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Ruth!” I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. “You do know. You must tell us--for his sake.” I pointed toward Ventnor.

She drew a long breath.

“You’re right--of course,” she said unsteadily. “Only I--I thought maybe I could fight it out myself. But you’ll have to know it--there’s a taint upon me.”

I caught in Drake’s swift glance the echo of my own thrill of apprehension for her sanity.