Chapter 29

Coombe House had been transformed into one of the most practical nursing
homes in London. The celebrated ballroom and picture gallery were filled
with cots; a spacious bedroom had become a perfectly equipped operating
room; nurses and doctors moved everywhere with quiet swiftness. Things
were said to be marvellously well done because Lord Coombe himself held
reins which diplomatically guided and restrained amateurishness and
emotional infelicities.

He spent most of his time, when he was in the house, in the room on the
entrance floor where Mademoiselle had found him when she had come to him
in her search for Robin.

He had faced ghastly hours there as the war news struck its hideous
variant note from day to day. Every sound which rolled through the
street had its meaning for him, and there were few which were not
terrible. They all meant inhuman struggle, inhuman suffering, inhuman
passions, and wounds or death. He carried an unmoved face and a
well-held head through the crowded thoroughfares. The men in the cots in
his picture gallery and his ballroom were the better for the outward
calm he brought when he sat and talked to them, but he often hid a mad
fury in his breast or a heavy and sick fatigue.

Even in London a man saw and heard and was able, if he had an
imagination, to visualise too much to remain quite normal. He had seen
what was left of strong men brought back from the Front, men who could
scarcely longer be counted as really living human beings; he had talked
to men on leave who had a hideous hardness in their haggard eyes and who
did not know that they gnawed at their lips sometimes as they told the
things they had seen. He saw the people going into the churches and
chapels. He sometimes went into such places himself and he always found
there huddled forms kneeling in the pews, even when no service was being
held. Sometimes they were men, sometimes women, and often they writhed
and sobbed horribly. He did not know why he went in; his going seemed
only part of some surging misery.

He heard weird stories again and again of occult happenings. He had been
told all the details of Lady Maureen's case and of a number of other
cases somewhat resembling it. He was of those who have advanced through
experience to the point where entire disbelief in anything is not easy.
This was the more so because almost all previously accepted laws had
been shaken as by an earthquake. He had fallen upon a new sort of book
drifting about. He had had such books put into his hands by
acquaintances, some of whom were of the impressionable hysteric order,
but many of whom were as analytically minded as himself. He found much
of such literature in the book shops. He began to look over the best
written