Ladies’ Bane Read Free Page B

slow down until Time too-
    She came to herself with the feeling that she had been a long way off. She was lying on something very hard, and there was at least one thing that had not stopped. Professor MacPhail was still talking.
    “And we could be very comfortable here till the fog lifts if there was so much as a chair to sit on, or a candle-end to give us a glint of light. It’s wonderful how little ye can be doing with. There was my old grandfather, and well I remember him, brought up on a small farm, and the only light they had was the tallow dips they made themselves, and they had to be saving of those, so for the most part he would just study his lessons by the light of the kitchen fire. And his eyesight perrfect at eighty-seven years of age!” Ione struggled up on her elbow. The place was dark enough, but not so thick with fog. It was a horrid yellowish darkness, but it was easier to breathe than it had been out in the street. The floor under her was wood. The palm of her hand as she leaned on it was aware of dust and grit. She said in the best tradition of the fainting heroine,
    “Where are we?”
    “Are you better?”
    “Oh, yes-I’m all right. I don’t know what happened-everything just slipped. Where have we got to?”
    “One of the houses I was looking over. I really don’t think there’s a chance of getting anywhere until the fog lifts, and it’s better here than outside. I’m afraid everything’s been cut off, and there isn’t a stick of furniture in the place. But you can’t walk on a sprained ankle, and we shouldn’t get anywhere if you could. Look here, I laid you down flat because you had gone off, but now you have come round I think the best way would be to sit on the stairs. After all, one does it at a dance.”
    They sat on the stairs, and time went slowly by. Ione had a step to herself to begin with, but after an interval when she must have drifted into an uneasy sleep she found that there was a shoulder under her head and an arm that steadied her. It wasn’t the Professor’s arm, because the whisky seemed to be some way off… She slid back into sleep again…
    It was the kind of sleep in which you keep on coming to the surface and drifting off. Whenever she did come back, the Professor seemed to be talking, the sound of his rolling r’s like the drum-beat in a dance rhythm. Presently he was saying,
    “There’s that old chestnut about the mandarin in China. Ye’ll have heard it
ad nauseam
, but it raises a very interesting moral problem. If by pressing a button which would cause the death of this totally unknown person, ye could benefit three-quarters of the human race, would ye, or would ye not, be justified in pressing the button?”
    Mr. Severn’s voice was much nearer as he said,
    “How do you know that it’s going to benefit three-quarters of the human race?” The tone had a touch of boredom, a touch of amusement.
    “That,” said the Professor, “ye will just have to hypothesize.”
    The word rolled grandly off his tongue. Ione considered it with awe. She could not believe that it really existed, but at a more convenient time, when she was able to have recourse to a dictionary, she discovered that it did. At the moment it just floated away and became part of a general state of mind in which dream and reality kept on changing place. The floor was hard, but her ankle had stopped hurting. She heard Mr. Severn say,
    “Well, three-quarters of the human race is a fairly large order, and if you get down to brass tacks, I feel pretty sure that the button-pusher is really only interested in one member of it-himself. Is he going to do himself a bit of good, or isn’t he? And if he does his button-pushing, is he going to get away with it? That’s a really very much better problem than the other, you know.”
    Professor MacPhail was understood to dissent from this. He used the word sordid with more r’s than the dictionary provides. He was saying that in order to arrive at a