Still, he must rush to stick a Band-Aid on the bleeding place.

Powell was in one of those hospital rooms which are described as “semi-private”; this meant that he lay in the part of the room nearest the door, and on the other side of the white curtain that split the room down the middle lay somebody who had hired one of the hospital television sets; he was listening to a hockey game, apparently of the first importance, with the volume turned well up. The commentators were describing the play and discussing its significance, in a high state of excitement.

“Oh, Sim bach, you darling man! How good of you to come! Would you ask that bugger to turn down his bloody machine?”

Geraints head was heavily bandaged, though his face could be seen; it was bruised, but no wounds were visible. One arm was in plaster, and his left leg, swathed in some medical wrapping, was hoisted upward in a sling that hung from a metal brace attached to the bed.

“Would you please turn down the volume of your set? My friend is very ill and we want to talk.”

“Hey? What did you say? You’ll have to speak up; I’m a bit deaf. Great game, eh? The Hatters have got the Soviet team on the run. My pet team. The Medicine Hatters. Best in the League. If they win this one, we might get the Cup yet. Big night, eh?”

“Yes, but could you turn it down a bit? My friend is very ill.”

“Is he? This’ll cheer him up. Would you like to pull back the curtain so he can see?”

“Thank you, a very kind offer. But he really is suffering.”

“This’ll fix him. Hey—did you see that? Just missed it! Donniker is in great shape tonight. He’s showing those Russkies what defence work is. Hey—look at that! Wowie!”

It appeared that nothing could be done. The man in the other bed was gripped by the ruling passion, and it was hopeless to talk to him.

“Well, old man, how are you?” said Darcourt.

“I am at the head of the Valley of Grief in the Uplands of Hell,” Geraint replied.

He’s had that one ready, thought Darcourt, This may be heavy going.

“I came as soon as I knew. What on earth has happened to you?”

“Retribution, Sim bach. I have made an utter balls of everything! My life is in tatters and I have nobody to blame but myself. This is punishment for sin, and I have nothing to do but accept it, swallow it, suffer it, take up my cross, prostrate myself before the Throne, and die! It runs in my family; my great-grandfather and my Uncle David both died of disgrace and despair. Turned their faces to the wall. I am trying to die. It’s the least I can do under the circumstances. Oh God, my head!”

Darcourt sought out a nurse; she was down the hall at the nursing-station, where she and a clutch of nurses and interns were huddled around a tiny television screen, watching the great game. But she came long enough to go to the other side of the white curtain and turn down the set of the enthusiast who shared the semi-private, who protested that his deafness required greater volume. She also, at his urgent request, brought Darcourt a glass of Alka-Seltzer to assuage his raging stomach. In the somewhat less uproarious atmosphere, he tried to soothe Powell.

“Now Geraint, don’t talk like that. They tell me you are doing nicely, considering everything. You are not going to die, so put that idea right out of your head. You will be up and around in about three weeks, they say, and must be quiet and help the medical people all you can.”

“A positive attitude! That’s what they keep telling me. ‘You must take a positive attitude, because it helps greatly with the healing, and in a few weeks you’ll be right as rain.’ But I don’t want to be right as rain! I don’t deserve it. Let the tempest rage!”

“Oh, come on, Geraint! Don’t carry on like that!”

“Carry on? Carry on? Sim bach, that is a bruising expression. Oh, how my head hurts!”

“Of course your head hurts when you shout like that. Just whisper. I can hear you if I come really close. Now tell me what happened.”

“Malory, Sim bach. Malory is what happened. The night before last I was reading Malory; it quiets the mind, and it brings me very near to Arthur—King Arthur, I mean—and his court and his great schemes and his afflictions. My book fell open at the Madness of Lancelot. You know it? You must; everybody does.”

“I remember it.”

“Then you know what it says: ‘he lepte oute at a bay-wyndow into a gardyne, and there wyth thornys he was all to-cracched of hys vysage and hys body, and so he ranne furth he knew not whothir, and was as wylde as ever man was. And so he ran two yere, and never man had grace to know him.’ “

“And that is what you did?”

“In modern terms, that is what I did. I had been having a few, naturally, and reflecting on my outcast state, and the more I thought, the more of a miserable wretch I knew I was, and suddenly I couldn’t hold in any longer. I leapt out of my window—not a bay—and on the ground floor by the mercy of God. I got into my car, and drove like hell, I don’t remember where, but I ended up in that park and you know how spooky woods are at night, and as I drove the feeling became more and more Arthurian and Maloryesque, and there I was, roaring around among the trees, making sharp turns and narrow circles—all at incredible speed, boy; a great racing driver has been lost in me—and I became conscious that courtly pavilions were appearing out of the woods to the right and left—”

“The public conveniences, I understand. You very nearly smashed into them.”

“That be damned! It was a great pavilion, a mighty tent, with flags floating.”

“That must have been the Festival Theatre.”

“Armed men and peasantry were skipping about among the trees, marvelling at me.”

“The police certainly. I don’t know about the peasantry, but there were plenty of witnesses. That’s a very easily identified car you drive.”

“Don’t belittle my agony, Sim bach; don’t reduce it to mere every-day. This was an Arthurian madness—the madness of Lancelot. Then everything went black.”

“You hit a tree. You were crazy-drunk and driving very much to the public danger in a public park, and you hit a tree. I’ve been reading the papers on my way here. Now look, Geraint: I don’t underestimate your temperament, or your involvement with Malory, but facts are facts.”

“Yes, but what are the facts? I am not talking about police-court facts, or newspaper lies, but psychological facts. I was in the grip of a great archetypal experience, and what it looked like to outsiders doesn’t count. Listen; listen to me.”

“I’m listening, but you mustn’t expect me to rush off into the moonshine with you, Geraint. Understand that.”

“Sim—Sim, my dear old friend. Sim, who out of all mankind I look to for sympathetic understanding, hear me. You are very harsh, boy. Your tongue is so sharp it would draw blood from the wind. Sim, you don’t know what I am. I am the son of a man of God. My father, now singing a rich bass in the Choir Invisible, was a very well known Calvinistic Methodist minister in Wales. He brought me up in the knowledge and fear of God. You know what that means. You are a man of God yourself, though of the episcopal, ritualist sort, for which I forgive you, but you must have the true knowledge in you someplace.”

“I hope so.”

“Sim—I have never forgotten or really forsaken my early doctrine, though my life has taken me into the world of art, which is God’s world too, though horribly flawed in many of its aspects. I have sinned greatly, but never against art. You know what has been my downfall?”

“Yes. Booze.”

“Oh, Sim, that is unworthy! A drop now and then to ease deep inner pain, but never my downfall. No, no; my downfall was the flesh.”

“Woman, you mean?”

“Not woman, Sim. I have never been dissolute. No, not woman, but Woman, that highest embodiment of God’s glory and goodness, with whom I have tried to enlarge myself and raise myself. But, wretch that I am, I took the wrong path. The flesh, Sim, the flesh!”