10

It was not merely the planning of the last and greatest of all pogroms that fevered the now almost unsleeping brain of Rud. It was indeed the dominant theme of his disordered mind, but at times it receded to give place to narrower, intenser moods of uncontrollable distrust. Perpetual vigilance is the seed of madness. It trails a perpetual wakefulness. His mind was festering now with suspicion whenever two or three were gathered together in any sort of co–operation.

Every sort of association made him uneasy, every professional solidarity made him uneasy. He had never subdued his fear of medical men after that vindictive trial and execution of Bodisham's doctors. He felt all the doctors were now his enemies. Then there were men of science. The physicists, the mathematicians, seemed tame cats for the most part; the biologists, the psychologists were more outspoken; but they all hung together. They, too, he felt, had their shibboleths, their hidden understandings. They, too, looked at him now with incommunicable thoughts in their eyes.

He suspected even the teachers of mathematics and physics. Olders found him one day crouched together, sitting on his feet in a big arm–chair in his bureau, puzzling over a text–book of mathematical crystallography, trying to detect the treason behind the pinacoids.

His doctors he subjected to the most searching questioning. He was always consulting fresh ones secretly and then confronting them with any apparent contradiction from the diagnoses he had extracted from their fellow–experts. His general malaise increased. He was ceasing to eat as well as ceasing to sleep.

At this stage, with a profound distrust of all other doctors, suddenly he bethought himself of Carstall and turned to him.

In spite of his flatterers and worshippers, in spite of his growing sense of divinity, Rud had still a curious feeling about Carstall left over from the days of Hooplady House, a faint, exalted, snobbishness. It came to him now as a thing supremely desirable that Carstall should be willing to stand over him and fend off these impalpable treacheries that menaced him. He had always wanted Carstall to care for him—from their earliest meeting. Now he decided that Carstall should indeed care for him—that Carstall should leave whatever else he happened to be doing at the time and become Rud's personal attendant.