Sleep Has His House Page 13

  linking up with

  a cinema audience in tightly-packed hall. The rows of people seen from the back all exactly similar somewhat elongated heads with protuberant ears. A big flag with crossed emblem hangs over the screen where an air-raid is shown in progress. Deafening accompaniment of appropriate noises: bombs, rockets, ack-ack, sirens, shouts, clanging bells of fire engines, ambulances, etc. Walls seen crumbling, A.R.P. and N.F.S. personnel search through wreckage and rubble for victims under mobile arc-lamps. A woman is carried by on a stretcher; where her face was, foot-long splinters of glass project like porcupine quills. A growl of rage, baited-animal sound, travels along the watching rows of the audience.

  Quick over the road to the movie theatre on the other side. The rows of people here seen from the back all exactly similar somewhat square heads with protuberant ears. A big flag with circular emblem hangs over the screen where an air-raid is shown in progress. Deafening accompaniment of appropriate noises: bombs, rockets, ack-ack, sirens, shouts, clanging bells of fire engines, ambulances, etc. Walls seen crumbling, A.R.P. and N.F.S. personnel hunt through wreckage and rubble for victims under mobile arc-lamps. A woman is carried by on a stretcher; where her face was, foot-long splinters of glass project like porcupine quills. A growl of rage, baited-animal sound, travels along the watching rows of the audience.

  Quickly the audiences of the two theatres crowding blackly out, overflowing the street like opposing ant-swarms. A rumbling roar goes up as they converge upon one another, interpenetrate.

  The searchlight beam (now for the sake of convenience to be identified with the untroubled eye up above) wanders restlessly:

  after a not arbitrary number of glimpses of world happenings,

  roams towards a huge solitary fang-shaped rock, almost a mountain, jutting sheer out of the ocean, sleek oil-black faintly polished, belted with white scalloped beading of foam. A sudden long inexplicable swell gathers on the smooth water, mounting quickly to tidal-wave size, travels increasingly rapidly and toweringly to the rock; at the moment of impact the eyebeam telescopes into close-up of the shattering wave with heavy spray mane wind-combed and white from the black wave blown back.

  In still closer analysis, the spray particles brightly illuminated, particularized, individualized, metamorphosed into papers of all descriptions.

  Envelopes (with stamps of various countries, airmail stamps, Opened by Censor, D.D.A. stickers, O.H.M.S. signs, etc.) addressed in various handwritings or typewritten to places all over the world. Letters from lovers, banks, businesses, ministries, consulates, etc.; on embossed paper, thin paper, papers with printed headings, pages tom from exercise books. Birth, marriage, death certificates; diplomas, passports, dossiers, warrants, licences, ballot cards, invitations, tickets, cheques, coupons, leaflets, cables, menus, currency notes, programmes, manuscripts, drawings, photographs, labels, press-cuttings. These appear briefly (there is barely time to read them) with headlines in utter confusion. As

  Gas leads suicide methods this winter. Shaw mumbles no in beard to love notes. Mayan temple hieroglyphics used as play-suit trimmings. No bass violinists in Folsom Prison. Atom Bomb opens new era in world destruction, entire city vaporized in black rain, victims vanish. Bishop thanks God for science.

  There are perhaps one or two full paragraphs

  Phosgene is the most practical and economical gas for the production of quick death. While mustard-gas casualties are a long time in hospital, sometimes several months, there is nothing about them, immediately after being gassed, to inspire terror in other troops. With phosgene, however, if heavily gassed, men will be dropping dead like flies in a few hours ...

  The impact of his body loosened the jam and started the coal moving downward to the funnel in the centre of the floor. While his companions ran for aid, Seery flailed about and when police of Emergency Squad 4 reached the scene only his head and shoulders were visible. The bottom of an ashcan was ripped out and lowered to him as an improvised caisson. A rope was then dropped and planks were laid on top of the moving coal on which Fire Captain Charles Kuchas of Hook and Ladder Co. 24 clambered to Seery and administered a hypodermic. Then the Rev. W. J. Faricker of the Church of the Epiphany made the same dangerous journey to administer the last rites of the Catholic Church. As Father Faricker finished the rope snapped and Seery was sucked beneath the surface ...

  Take a pleasant breezy jaunt with Jimmy Fidler, on location every day at the Mirror ...

  Finally the whole mass of papers flying, whirling through the air like Alice’s pack of cards. The paper storm condenses, recedes, spirals into funnel-shaped white cloud-whirl, tornado, travelling away at great speed over perfectly featureless, blank, near-black field: vanishing. The neutral shadowblank holds for a moment of discharging tension as the blissful eyes up above defocus slowly.

  I can’t remember the journey or who arranged it. No one told me where I was going. No one told me the name of the shadow house or why I was brought there.

  Some things about the place were confusing. There were wet nights when it seemed to be the house where my mother lived. Sometimes when the rain struck at the window I called my mother’s face to the black glass in the way a fisherman draws a fish to the surface of the water. Then it was hard to tell which face was my own.

  Sometimes the shadow house was extremely quiet: vigilant silence crouched against every door. Sometimes the walls rang with tremendous music, lsrafel sang, whose heartstrings are a lute, and all the ghosts of China twittered like crazy birds.

  Sometimes my mother’s familiars, sadness and boredom, loitered among the shadows: then I looked out of the window quickly.

  My window was a magic glass which gave everything it reflected a kind face. Even hostility and chaos smiled in that mirror. When I looked out of the window everything became friendly and clear and simple. All day I could watch the white sky children wreathing light-hearted dances in their playground, while the air cherished them like a mother. And in the night my own mother came to the window to meet me, strange, solitary; splendid with countless stars; my mother Night; mine, lovely, mine. My home.

  IT’S RATHER dark in the house where B has gone, and this isn’t because it’s evening outside. Of course, sometimes it is night out of doors, and then you’d expect the house to be dark indeed: but curiously enough there’s very little difference inside between the night and the day. It’s always twilight in those rooms where a lamp or a candle is just as likely to be burning at noon as in the small hours of the morning.

  The house is really difficult to describe. You can say that it’s in a town, in a long street of other houses. But that only conveys the vaguest impression, if it isn’t actually misleading, for some of the upstairs windows look clean into the country with its lakes and streams and fields and forests and villages and the majestic mountains behind. It’s no easier to give a picture of the interior either. Like most old places, this house has been altered and enlarged again and again so that the rooms are of all shapes and sizes and periods, opening one into another, or linked by galleries or flights of steps leading up and down in the most unexpected and unconventional way. One circular tower room, for instance, appears to have been built on quite haphazard, as if the architect had overlooked the necessity for connecting it with the rest of the building, and had only added as an afterthought a crooked little staircase hidden away in a comer which you might pass a dozen times without noticing. This irregularity of design makes it hard to find your way about in the house. It’s such a rambling old place, there are so many rooms, and all of them half-dark, that you can never be absolutely certain you’ve been into every one.

  B herself is often surprised when she is wandering in the passages to find that she has come to a door which she has never seen before. And this is particularly apt to happen just when she feels that she has at last mastered the plan of the different floors.

  It almost seems as if alterations were continually taking place in the outlying parts of the house, certain rooms chang
ing their shape or position or even disappearing entirely, and other new rooms proliferating in distant corridors: while the main part of the construction, the hall, kitchens, dining-room, library, principal bedrooms and so on, remain more or less stabilized. Certainly, minor changes are liable to occur even in these rooms; but they are unimportant and chiefly confined to differences of furniture, decoration or general arrangement. Thus, in place of a window, there may one day appear some ancient half-indistinguishable portrait of a state dignitary in solemn robes. And then very possibly within a few hours a window will again have taken the picture’s place: but this time the window, instead of overlooking the street as before, will be facing on to a formal paved yard, bounded by high walls, and with a clipped shrub growing in each comer.

  On the face of it, this looks like a lot of unnecessary expenditure of energy. It’s hard to conceive any acceptable explanation of such changeability; unless the proprietors have adopted some complicated eclectic system with regard to the place. The best way, as in all these obscure matters, is simply to accept the situation without inquiring into causality, which would most likely be incomprehensible even if brought to light.

  B, in any event, does not speculate about what goes on. These constant unpredictable variations, which some people might find disconcerting, to her constitute one of the great charms of the house. The pleasant anticipation of novelty turns the opening of every door into an adventure.

  How does a girl like B feel, you may wonder, alone in this great dark place? The question can be answered in four simple words: B is at home. And she’s not lonely either. Her companions are the many mirrors which hang all over the house in the various rooms. Probably there has never been a house which contained as many mirrors as this one. Mirrors framed in every imaginable style, from the huge glass in the salon with its magnificent eagle whose wide wings, glimmering with dim gilt in the dusk, seemed poised already in imperial flight, to the convex circle, no larger than a plate, which microcosmically reflects in steely recession the window at the turn of the stairs and a whole pinpoint Breughel landscape beyond. Long cheval glasses lean inquiringly in the bedrooms like strangers wishing to ask the way. In alcoves, in the passages, on landings, you will unexpectedly catch, just as you sometimes catch someone else’s eye in a crowd, the subdued and watchful gleam of a mirror. And in every one of these mirrors B recognizes the fair-haired girl who is her closest friend.

  Even without this mirror friend there would be plenty of entertainment to be had just by looking out of the windows. Sometimes, on certain days or in certain rooms, the curtains are drawn, and then of course it’s inadvisable to attempt to look outside. But usually there is nothing to prevent you from studying the view. What a variety of views there are too. That’s what makes window-gazing from this house so delightful.

  Perhaps it’s Christmas-time in the street. You can sit on the wide window-seat sheltered by a wine-coloured velvet curtain and watch the snow feathers falling. The children are throwing snowballs as they run home in the twilight, their cheeks are bright red, they wear ear-muffs and warm mittens and little round caps made of fur. Their movements are like a dance. What a joy it is to watch such spontaneous happiness.

  The tongues of the bells in the church steeple at the end of the street dart sharp and clean as icicles in the freezing air. The sky is the deep blue of sapphires, the snow bums blue-white, lighted windows blossom one after the other.

  In the house opposite they are having a party. A huge holly wreath tied with red satin ribbon hangs on the door knocker. Gold light streams from the windows, and inside you can see the gorgeous Christmas-tree and the guests in their fine clothes. In one room people are dancing to the music of a piano and violin: in another, boys and girls are just sitting down to a table decorated with flowers and candles and toys. How gay all the faces are! What peace and friendliness inside the festive rooms; and the beautiful frozen night out of doors. It makes you feel warm and comfortable just to look at it all.

  Or, maybe, delicate muslin ruffles are floating gently in and out of the open window in a warm breeze. The air enters scented with roses, with honeysuckle and clover, fresh with the smell of grass which men have been cutting all day long in the fields. Stripped to the waist, their torsos beautiful as light bronze, the strong young haymakers rhythmically swing their scythes through the final swaths. The heavy haywains lumber home in the dusk. From the village rises the sound of singing and laughter; a cheerful clatter of pans comes from the kitchens where women in bright aprons are preparing the evening meal. Lovers walk in the orchards under the ripening fruit. Grave and benign like archangels, the white winged mountains stand in the darkening sky.

  Yes, there’s always something fascinating to be seen from the windows. And then there’s the house itself, a perpetual source of interest and surprise. Why, you could easily spend a lifetime investigating the library alone. Not to mention the pictures, the clocks, the tapestries, and the curious objects stored in the different rooms; the attics crowded with trunks, every one packed full of unimaginable and exciting treasures; the porcelain, silver, silk, crystal, ivory, jade, collected through many centuries and in many lands; the clothes folded away in the cupboards; the very pots and pans in the kitchen, the canisters full of strange spices, the herbs and cordials and preserves, the vast stone urnlike crocks on the storeroom floor.

  It’s really impossible to mention even a fraction of the riches contained in a house so inexhaustibly endowed with wonders from all over the world, as well as with its own unique, complex, incomparable individuality. You get confused when you try to describe it; the mind is embarrassed by such a wealth of material; you hardly know where to begin or where to leave off.

  Well, the line has to be drawn somewhere: and that’s why it seems useless to say any more except that no discriminating person would ever willingly leave such a house once they had taken up residence in it; or find any other house even tolerable afterwards.

  PETER OWEN LTD

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  ©Anna Kavan 1948

  ©Rhys Davies and R. B. Marriott 1973

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