Clapping my hands, Billy says, I fell back into a chair.
But I was out of it again in an instant. I was not to escape so easily as all that. Kato had his finger on the lever; I cannot say how, nor whether, he guessed what was to come, nor whether he tried to avert it; if he did, he was too late. From that damnable box there came a long catarrhal wheeze—high-pitched and tenor the words came:
"Now, Evie—Evie's turn—make her sing, mother—bosh—of course she's going to sing!——"
I was neither at Aunt Angela's party nor yet in a boat on a summer's evening up the River. How can I tell you where I was? In what drawing-room? Sitting on what chair? Surrounded by what company?... I swear to you that I have seen a place I have never seen, been in a place I never in my life was in. I can describe to you a family gathering with Mrs Merridew there, and her son there, and Evie there, and myself never, never there. I have seen, whether they ever existed or not, French windows opening on a lawn, and a slackened tennis-net beyond, and an evening flush in the sky, and the air dark with homing rooks.... Nothing will persuade me that these eyes are in fact ignorant of that quiet home of Archie Merridew's—and yet Guildford is a place in which I have never been.
Then a sound like the hissing of a thousand cisterns filled my ears. Through it I heard Kitty Windus's scream of terror, but it sounded an infinite distance away. From Evie I had heard nothing. For one moment I saw everything reel and aslant—Kato, the Schmerveloffians on the sofa, the cistern-post with its hats and coats and one hook empty, steeving up towards a tilted ceiling....
Then came the blow on the back of my head, and the sounds of the cistern ceased. I had fallen across Aunt Angela's tiled hearth, and lay in a cloud of steam from the kettle I had overturned in my fall.