Knowing nothing about the drug, he always imagined this when his father fell asleep suddenly. He knew that his father did smoke it sometimes; for he had once said in rather too jovial and conversational a tone, “A fellow in Java suggested that we should each try a pipe one night; but the stuff did nothing to me, except make me sick, so I’ve never touched it again.”

Always, after this sentence, Orvil was waiting and watching to catch the smell of opium round his father. He knew the smell, because when he was nine his aunt, knowing that he loved bijouterie and toys, gave him an old Chinese opium-box. It was made of ivory which had been stained by the drug to the colour of a chestnut horse. When Orvil first lifted the lid, an unmistakable, quite novel odour had escaped. Sticky brown opium still clung to the sides and the bottom of the ivory box. Every holidays, whenever he returned to his cupboard of small treasures, he would take off the lid and sniff the strange opium smell again.

He looked at his father once more. Orvil wanted to go up to bed, and he wondered whether to wake his father or not. For his own part he would rather have left him sleeping, but he was afraid that if he did this his father might disgrace himself in some way, under the glass roof in the hotel lounge. He might belch in his sleep, or snore, or swear, or give away terrible family secrets in that specially alarming sleep-talker’s voice.

He touched him on the shoulder lightly and said, “I’m going up to bed, Daddy.”

Mr. Pym opened his eyes and looked at him quite blankly for a moment, then his eyes focused, losing their resemblance to boiled cod’s eyes, and he replied, “Good night, Microbe. Sleep tight. Don’t let the fleas bite.”

.   .   .

Orvil had had the strangest night. The temptation to do something bad had come many times, but he had withstood it, and had felt very powerful and good, as if God were on his side. His dreams had been even more terrifying and wonderful than usual. He found himself lying full-length in an enormous open wound. The exposed, gently bubbling, cushiony flesh was very comfortable; but he knew that if he moved even his eyelid muscle he would inflict terrible pain on the giant in whose wounded red bosom he lay. In another dream, grotesquely enlarged diamonds waved about on long gold wires. They were contrived to look like sunflowers in a garden bed. Orvil was a very small child lost under the artificial leaves of these flowers. The wind blew; the diamonds rocked madly, backwards and forwards, banging their cruel facets against Orvil’s face. Like glittering, vicious footballs of ice, the huge diamonds struck his head, tearing the flesh till his eyes were filled with blood and he could feel the points of adamant ringing on white bone.

He awoke singing the love-song of Thais. At least that is what he called it. He had heard it last term on a master’sgramophone. Triumphant sounds of pain flowed out of him. He was singing loudly now, trying to fill in the various instruments of the orchestra below and above the theme. He felt in his heart that it should be quite possible to sing three parts at once, just as it is possible to hear them.

When he had first heard the Thais gramophone record, he had not given it much attention, but the rather frightening eccentric master, in his two pairs of tinted glasses, had impressed it on him by walking up and down the room talking about it, and then by playing it again.

The occasion for the gramophone recital had been a strange tea-party given by the master to his French class. Orvil remembered with pleasure the low dining-room in the desolate house, the house-boy dressed in Boy Scout’s uniform, the huge lard-sodden doughnuts encrusted with sugar, the kitchen cups large as babies’ chambers, and the thin delicate old spoons quite lost in their rude saucers.

Orvil remembered the spoons particularly, for they were beautiful early-Victorian ones with bowls shaped like scallop-shells and crests on the handles. How he wanted one of the spoons! But he had not the strength of mind to steal the one which lay so near in his saucer . . .

Orv il jumped out of bed and went to look at his face in the mirror. He was afraid that now, at fifteen, he was beginning to lose his good looks. “O God, never let my voice break, or a beard grow on my face,” he had prayed.