They seemed to understand my feelings, although they could not know their cause, and tried to keep me from brooding. By tacit understanding no references were made to my past. They accepted me as a stranger, and yet there was the same latent suspicion on Elizabeth’s part. And I could not help seeing that some heavy grief or apprehension hung over them. And I felt that I was an intruder upon it. At night I would hear David pacing his room for hours, and sometimes a groan would break from his lips.
He gave me to understand that the summons to appear before the Council might be delayed for days or weeks. It was always presented unexpectedly, and always peremptory, he said. During the week following my arrival at the Strangers’ House I never went out alone. Whenever I made the suggestion, David either volunteered to accompany me or found some excuse to detain me. In particular, he requested me to stay within doors during the four hours when he was at the Bureau, in the morning.
Finally I became almost exasperated. “You have told me that I am free,” I protested.
“And you are free, Arnold,” he answered. “It is for your own sake that I make this request of you. There are hidden things, shadows against the sunlight of our civilization, and transitory, I hope, which you would hardly understand. You must learn them by degrees, Arnold. To me they have seemed necessary in this transitional epoch; but they are hard, Arnold; hard to endure.”
And he sighed in so melancholy a fashion that I suspected one of those shadows rested on his own home.
Yes, there were hidden things, and I got no nearer the heart of them, although I had hints as to their nature. For instance, there was the Animal Vivisection Bureau. I wondered why David spoke of the Animal Vivisection Bureau, and not of the Vivisection Bureau.
I never had realized before how large a share animals played in our lives. The horse, I was told, had not existed in the British Province for a generation. Cats disappeared when the rodent virus was invented, and were now only to be found in a wild state in the woods. There seemed to be no dogs, and I did not ask David about them.
There was no social life at all. The other inmates of the Strangers’ House were lodged on the different floors and ate in common, living under the watchful care of the deputies, who occasionally came to David for advice or instructions. Our only neighbor on the top floor was a little woman with two children who had come from a northern city and intended to return as soon as passes for leaving London, which had been stopped, were again issued. Inspectors from the Children’s Bureau visited her nearly every day, always leaving her in a condition of terror, as I inferred from a remark dropped by Elizabeth. Her husband had dropped dead in the street two months before. David told me that these sudden deaths were common, and were considered a triumph for medical science.
And yet I knew that David had visitors after the solar lights went out. My room was at the end of the apartment near the street; but I heard strangers tiptoe along the passage, and whispered colloquies in David’s room. My host would appear abstracted the next morning, and watch me very thoughtfully. At such times I felt more than ever an intruder in the household.
Yes, it was a world Lazaroff would have appreciated, could he have had his wish fulfilled, to be born into it. Would his viewpoint have changed, I wondered? It was a world from which all the amenities and charities of life seemed to have been banished. I tried to lead up to that subject in my talks with David, but he appeared unable to understand me.