“You lost yourself, sir?” she asked sympathetically. The ‘sir’ gave Orvil a pleasant thrill, then it made him feel ashamed. “Yes,” he said, “I must have taken the wrong turning.”

The maid looked at him with eyes that were not a bit unfriendly.

“This old place is a proper Chinese puzzle, isn’t it!”she laughed. It seemed a very smart, gay sentence to Orvil. He had never heard the expression ‘a Chinese puzzle’ before . . . Then suddenly he saw the hotel as a terrifying labyrinth, with the Minotaur waiting for him somewhere in the dark.

.   .   .

That day they drove to Salisbury. Mr. Pym’s second son, Ben, was in camp near there with the school Officers’ Training Corps.

After leaving their bags at the hotel, Orvil and his father drove out on to the Plain. Mr. Pym had told the chauffeur to drive until he saw white tents glistening. Orvil was the first to catch sight of the gleaming cones. The chauffeur made towards them, but found that he had to leave the car some distance away, on the main road; for the track which led up to the camp was a bog of soft creamy mud.

Mr. Pym and Orvil got out of the car and started to wade through the mud. Both were silent. They both felt guilty yet pleased that they were not made to suffer this camp life; but something in them longed for it too.

Suddenly they came upon Ben, looking very sweaty and handsome and sulky. He was evidently on fatigue, for he wore filthy, grease-stiff dungarees and was carrying two brimming latrine buckets which he slopped viciously at each step. When he saw his father and young brother, he dumped the buckets down on the ground and stood aghast for a moment; then he laughed out loud, and the situation was saved. The other two ran forward to greet him, but he waved them back, saying, “Don’t come too near, or you’ll be overcome.”

The sight and the smell were indeed already having a curious effect on Orvil. The buckets seemed to hold for him a rather alarming fascination. He wanted to poke a stick into their depths and stir about. He wanted to play with the floating lumps, tossing them high up into the airon the point of the stick. Yet all this time another self, a very feminine, fastidious self, battled against these ideas violently, even telling him that his fine-looking, extremely fair brother would be quite spoilt for him from now on, by being for ever associated with this disgusting filth.

Mr. Pym settled with Ben that he was to come into Salisbury when his fatigue was over; and that night, after dinner together, they would all go to the Searchlight Tattoo.

Orvil looked back once at his dear brother, so charming and white and clean in spite of the outer shell of filth. He dwelt angrily on his brother’s handsomeness, to wipe out the picture of him carrying the buckets.

Back in his room at the hotel, Orvil lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. The cascara sagrada had begun to work inside him, and he was also filled with spiritual misery. If only he could die! he thought. Or if he could be free, quite free, with adult rights fully protected; with a little money, a little room, and work he loved to do. If only his fascinating sunburnt mother could rise out of the grave and come back to him in her curious ugly red-and-green tartan dress with the shiny belt—the one she had bought at the fashionable friend’s shop. If he could put her rings on for her once again, and make her eyebrows up at night, just as he used to do so cleverly, with the tiny black brush.

In a half-dream he saw it all happen—his mother rising up from the grave. But she did not wear her red-and-green dress; she was in a tousled peach nightgown, her eyes were shut, her golden toast-coloured hair matted and pressed down with earth. The earth crumbled out of her eye-sockets; Orvil saw a piece roll down and disappear between her breasts. Her nose had rotted away!

“O darling, О darling!” he cried out, not knowing how to bear the horror of this ever recurring dream. He always saw her struggling out of the earth—until he remembered that she had been cremated; then the picture of her half-burnt body in the furnace seemed to scream at him.

He woke up and remembered the time when she had tried to beat him with the ivory hair-brush. She had chased him round her glistening bathroom, caught him at last behind the pale blue basin, and had there begun to belabour him fiercely.