Fillery moved his head and looked at his companion. The expression of both face and figure arrested him. He had taken off his dinner jacket, and the old loose golfing coat he wore hung askew; he had one hand in a pocket of it, the other thrust deep into his trousers. His glasses hung down across his crumpled shirt-front, his black tie made an untidy cross. He looked, thought Fillery, whose sense of the ludicrous became always specially alert in his gravest moments, like an unhappy curate who had presided over some strenuous and worrying social gathering in the local town hall. Only one detail denied this picture—the expression of something mysterious and awed in the sheet-white face. He was listening with sharp dislike yet eager interest. His repugnance betrayed itself in the tightened lips, the set of the angular shoulders; the panic was written in the glistening eyes. There were things in his face he could never, never tell. The struggle in him was natural to his type of mind: he had experienced something himself, and a personal experience opens new vistas in sympathy and understanding. But—the experience ran contrary to every tenet of theory and practice he had ever known. The moment of new birth was painful. This was his colleague's diagnosis.
Fillery then suddenly realized that the gulf between them was without a bridge. To tell his own experience became at once utterly impossible. He saw this clearly. He could not speak of it to his assistant. It was, after all, incommunicable. The bridge of terms, language, feeling, did not exist between them. And, again, up flashed for a second his sense of the comic, this time in an odd touch of memory—Povey's favourite sentence: "Never argue with the once-born!" Only to older souls was expression possible.
For the first time then his diagnosis wavered oddly. Why, for instance, did Paul persist in that curious, watchful stare...?
Devonham, conscious of his chief's eyes and mind upon him, looked up. Somewhere in his expression was a glare, but nothing revealed his state of mind better than the fact that he stupidly contradicted himself:
"You're putting all this into him, Edward," a touch of anger, perhaps of fear, in the intense whispering voice. "The hysteria of the studio upset him, of course. If you'd left him alone, as you promised, he'd have always stayed LeVallon. He'd be cured by now." Then, as Fillery made no reply or comment, he added, but this time only the anxiety of the doctor in his tone: "Hadn't you better go up to him at once? He's your patient, not mine, remember!"
The other took his arm. "Not yet," he said quietly. "He's best alone for the moment." He smiled, and it was the smile that invariably won him the confidence of even the most obstinate and difficult patient. He was completely master of himself again. "Besides, Paul," he went on gently. "I want to hear what you have to tell me. Some of it—if not all. I want your Report. It is of value. I must have that first, you know."
They sat on the bottom stair together, while Devonham told briefly what had happened. He was glad to tell it, too. It was a relief to become the mere accurate observer again.
"I can summarize it for you in two words," he said: "light and sound. The sound, at first, seemed wind—wind rising, wind outside. With the light, was perceptible heat. The two seemed correlated. When the sound increased, the heat increased too. Then the sound became methodical, rhythmical—it became almost musical. As it did so the light became coloured. Both"—he looked across at the ghostly hat-rack in the hall—"were produced—by him."
"Items, please, Paul. I want an itemized account."
Devonham fumbled in the big pockets of his coat and eventually lit a cigarette, though he did not in the least want to smoke. That watchful, penetrating stare persisted, none the less. Amid the anxiety were items of carelessness that almost seemed assumed.