Sleep Has His House Page 7

  B does not move. There’s a violent conflict inside her. She longs to go down to the famous dancer, she’s longing to see the sights of the town at close quarters instead of looking on distantly from her tower. And yet something is holding her back, warning her not to venture out of the castle.

  Come down, come down, the ballerina calls again and again.

  All right, I’ll come, B answers finally, overcoming her hesitation. Wait for me. I’m coming immediately. Please don’t go on without me. I’ll be down in a moment.

  The pigeons fly up to her as she hurries away, they flutter about her, filling the air with their wings so that she can hardly see where she is going. A sound something like a groan comes from the gargoyle, which laboriously raises its claw in a gesture of restraint or appeal. B is far out of reach already: she does not see the movement or the stone tear which slowly and painfully extrudes from the gargoyle’s eye and rolls down the length of its pig’s snout.

  Soon she’s climbing into the carriage. And how glorious it is to be careering along behind those spirited horses at the side of the ballerina. It’s all wonderful, like a new world; the speed, the excitement, the applause, the hat-raising, the salutes of the passers-by, the privilege of being the envied companion of the subject of such universal admiration. The town, too, takes on a new aspect from this angle. The streets, which B is accustomed to viewing in foreshortened perspective, seem much finer than she had supposed them to be. Even the crooked lanes leading to the poorer quarters promise adventure and mysterious revelations.

  The ballerina points out new wonders at every corner. Look, look, she cries, and when she raises her arm the sleeve falls back like a calyx and new marvels reveal themselves. A girl has come to the fountain to fill her bucket with water; but as the carriage rolls by diamonds, emeralds, sapphires spout from the dolphin’s mouth, in a second her pail is full up with precious gems, a whole fortune flashes into the bucket in one beam of light. The ballerina laughs. The sound of her laughter is like bells ringing out from the hilltop. B seems to have heard that sound of bells in another place.

  Look, look, says the dancer again. In every window-box of the house they are passing the flowers come out with a rush and fling their bright petals down, showering the carriage and its occupants with scented confetti.

  Things like that keep happening continually. But now the horses are racing so fast that B doesn’t have time to catch more than confused glimpses of what’s going on. The speed at which the carriage is travelling makes her quite giddy and she has to cling to the edge of the seat to keep from overbalancing as they swing round the comers. Far, far overhead in the burning blue sky the pigeons are flying, keeping pace with the horses whose wild hooves clatter frantically on the paved street.

  Too fast, B calls out, I’m missing everything. Can’t we go a bit slower?

  She’s really a little nervous. Supposing one of the horses should slip and fall, or the carriage upset or run over somebody? It seems only too likely to happen.

  The dancer just laughs. Probably she didn’t hear what B said in the rush and noise of their progress. She at any rate doesn’t seem in the least anxious. Her yellow hair blows out in the wind as if a fire lighted her laughing face brilliant with power and joy.

  Suddenly the astonishing drive is over. Rearing and slithering, the horses are pulled to a standstill. The carriage rocks dangerously; and before it has become steady, the ballerina darts out like a bird, her feet in their green slippers fly up the steps of a magnificent building outside which an equestrian statue threateningly brandishes his great sword.

  Where are you going? Wait for me, B shouts, getting out of the carriage as fast as she can. The dancer doesn’t answer or look round. Perhaps she doesn’t realize that B has been left behind. Perhaps she has suddenly forgotten about her.

  In desperate haste B starts climbing the steps in pursuit. It’s no good, though. These steps up which the green shoes flew like birds B’s feet can only scale slowly and with infinite labour and pain. Each single step towers in front of her like a wall and she can only drag herself to the top of it by putting out all her strength. Her feet too feel hopelessly heavy and out of control, seeming, as they do sometimes in fevers, to belong to somebody else or to be weighted with heavy stones. Once or twice more she calls out to the ballerina. But already she’s lost hope, she knows there won’t be any response; the dancer has vanished behind the huge mounted knight who looms in between them.

  Besides, B is really too exhausted for shouting. It’s as much as she can do to draw breath at all. She stands quite alone now among the hostile faces that have collected around her. The crowd which previously waved and cheered with such enthusiasm has all at once become angry, threatening, morose. These people in their dark clothes watch her silently, like a herd of dangerous beasts, occasionally shifting their positions, or muttering, or exchanging ugly glances between themselves. They do not make any overt accusation, but B understands they resent her presence in that place, she has no business to be there and will be made to pay severely for her trespassing. What the penalty will be she hasn’t the faintest idea. But it’s only necessary to look at those heavy, lowering faces, at the same time stupid and vicious, like the heads of treacherous animals, to know that no brutality is out of the question.

  Very slowly the crowd is closing in on her, edging forward almost imperceptibly, but always decreasing the space which is her precarious safeguard. Panic-stricken, B’s eyes search wildly in every direction, without discovering a solitary sign of hope. Above her, sheer as a cliff, the blank façade blots out the sky. Like an implacable and denunciatory finger the long black shadow of the knight’s sword points to her over the heads of the crowd. The carriage has silently disappeared from the street below.

  A rumble such as might herald a natural catastrophe, a tidal-wave or an earthquake, comes from the onlookers who are all together murmuring the same fatal indictment, as, with obvious intent now, they draw in their constricting circle. B is like a mouse in a trap. She spins round, first one way and then the other, hardly knowing what she is doing. In one place the ranks of bodies seem less compact, she imagines that it might be possible to force a way through at this point, and dashes towards it. At the same moment she feels herself falling, the whole vast stairway collapses disastrously beneath her. With a great rush of wind the pigeons whirl down and beat all about her with their strong wings, bearing her along between them

  into a small room with no windows or doors visible. The walls are scrawled over with dimly seen occult symbols, pentacles, wands, swords, etc. There are shelves of books; and a few phantom-glimmering shapes of vases, or urns. B sits on what might or might not be a narrow bed, reading by the light of four candles in a cross-shaped holder. It’s very dark. The candles shed a flickering, limited ring of light over B and the open book and a part of the dusty stone floor, leaving everything else in shadow deepening to blackness in the comers. Here and there round the walls faint traceries of signs or letters come and go as the four flames waver. Absolute stillness. Hush. At approximately regular intervals B’s hand moves to turn over a page.

  After a time a vague stirring, thickening, in one of the dark comers: nothing so definite as movement at first: it’s more a sort of concentration of tension in that comer. From which tenuous chrysalis presently emerges a second B, B’s doppelgänger, materializing out of the shadows; coming nearer the light although very similar, with similar fair curled hair, discernibly older, wearier, more assured, more disillusioned; in fact, of course, A. Who, standing behind B, looking over her shoulder (B is unaware), remains for a while apparently reading what she is reading. Then, moving across the room, gradually departs from the scene in a reversal of the procedure by which she lately arrived.

  Simultaneously with her dissolution, a faint sibi-lance starting, not from any special point, but emanating from all over the room, very subdued, seeming as if it might be voiced by the four walls or by the ceiling and floor. A rustling, a susurratio
n, like blown leaves, in which now and then some reference to danger becomes incompletely distinguishable. This sound continues from now on, principally as an indeterminate rustle as of water, leaves, wind, occasionally clarifying itself into the actual word Danger or one of its synonyms. B, without actually hearing, is not oblivious, because whenever the word becomes recognizable, she looks up or makes an unquiet movement. Finally she jumps up, glancing nervously round the room, pushing her book away so that it strikes the candle-holder, rocking the candles and sending waves of light alternating with shadow in confusing sequence, like pages turned rapidly back and forth.

  At the same time the whispering loudens to ordinary speaking pitch, to clamour, to shouting, to utmost volume, as near deafening as possible, of voices chaotically shrieking, together, separately, interrupting, competing, with increasing speed and intensity, such phrases as: Danger, Keep Out; It is Dangerous To Open The Window; Danger de Mort. And So on.

  The earsplitting pandemonium is suddenly shattered; into long dry grumble and growl and intermittent snapping and cracking of bursting timbers, crumbling masonry, as the whole structure of the room collapses inwards, obliterating B in a heap of amorphous wreckage, rubble, from which thick clouds of dust are seen blowing upwards like spray. This, under blank moon as before, the celestial eye transiently takes stock of, passes on.

  WAS my mother afraid of the tigers? Was that the theme of the music she danced to with death in our quiet house?

  When I went home between the school terms I was still alone in those rooms where nothing had altered. It was the same then as if I’d never been away. My mother’s sadness and boredom still lived in the house with the shadows and the grey rain on the windows. Their presence accompanied me as I took my unspoken questions from room to room.

  Sometimes I had an impulse to ask my father about the things which perplexed me: I watched him and waited for the right time which never came. My father always seemed to be in a hurry. He was like an important stranger with no time to spare. He made decisions for me about practical things, he directed my life, and when he had done what was suitable he forgot me.

  At school and at home it was the same; I was alone. This I accepted and knew it would always be so, wherever I went, and whatever happened to me. There was no place for me in the day world. My home was in darkness and my companions were shadows beckoning from a glass.

  THIS TIME it’s not just the voice but the visible presence of the Liaison Officer which opens the dreaming eye. He’s reading again from what looks like the same book (although one can’t see the title), but the details of his appearance havealtered, he is bareheaded and wears a white garment—a smock or an overall—on top of his uniform. The chief alteration is in his manner. He’s no longer sure of himself, his voice sounds uneasy, his expression is puzzled, and he keeps glancing anxiously out of the window where there’s a distant view of a castle floating mirage-like in the mists. Except for the window and the major himself, there’s nothing much to be seen in this great gloomy old hall. Everything’s ghostly and grim and dark, and though there are people present, they seem to be in another dimension. All that’s perceptible is a continuous vague stir, as if a crowd of transparent onlookers were seated in thin air, fidgeting and whispering, rustling their spectral papers and shuffling their unseen feet.

  It’s enough to make anyone reading aloud feel nervous: especially as the atmosphere generated by these invisible spectators is far from friendly. There’s a sort of malicious tittering in the background: a nightmare Alice-in-Wonderland inconsequence, which is most disturbing. The inconsequential element is manifest too in certain architectural caprices and light shifts, whereby the building is given a fluctuating resemblance to a church, a law court, a prison, an operating theatre, a torture chamber, a vault. That the major is more and more affected by these metaphysical stresses, is evident from the increasing tension of his manner and voice as he reads:

  An instance of how misunderstandings and estrangements can occur between relatives:

  B wants to talk over some obscure point with her father. She has probably made several efforts to approach him already, but without success. Her attempts have up to now been always inopportune; perhaps made at a time when he was on the point of leaving for his office and, already a few minutes late, could not possibly delay his departure any longer. Or perhaps she spoke to him when he had just come home after a hard day’s work on some specially intricate and abstruse official problem and was too tired for talk. Or else, when other circumstances were propitious, an important message to which he was obliged to attend may have been telephoned through from the department by one of the under-secretaries.

  Today she makes up her mind to ask him at breakfast to fix a time for the conversation. At the regular hour she goes into the dining-room only to be told that her father ordered his breakfast earlier than usual and has left the house.

  B decides to follow him to his office, a journey which, travelling on the suburban train, normally takes about forty minutes. This morning, although no warning is given of any alteration in schedule, the train not only takes over two hours on the way, but finally deposits its passengers at a terminus in quite a different part of the city, from which she is obliged to make a complicated bus trip, involving several changes, to reach her destination.

  When she gets there, in a state of nervous anxiety after all these delays, a secretary informs her that her father has gone to lunch at a certain restaurant which she knows quite well. The man is friendly and sympathetic, he is anxious to help her, he is certain that if she goes at once she will catch her father before he has finished his meal. B thanks him and hurries off as fast as she can. But in spite of the fact that she’s perfectly familiar with this restaurant, has herself been taken there several times, she is unable to find it. Various passers-by of whom she inquires the way give her conflicting directions. In the end, a policeman tells her that demolition work was started some days ago on the building which had recently been classified as unsafe.

  Rushing back to the office, B arrives there just in time to see her father getting out of a car in front of the entrance. He pauses to say something to the driver. B calls out and starts running towards him. Her voice is drowned by the noise of the traffic; and, at that instant, by the sheerest bad luck, a whole lot of people, jostling one another in their anxiety to board an approaching bus, come crowding along, getting between B and her father who crosses the pavement quickly in front of them. B has no time to catch him before he disappears through the door which a saluting porter swings open and through which she is never allowed to pass. She sees the car glide away. She sees the door close. The situation is hopeless. The only thing left for her to do is to go home again.

  This time the journey takes no longer than usual. But at the house it transpires that her father has already been and gone; he must have driven home in his fast car immediately after she saw him, having found that he would be obliged to undertake a business trip to another city and wishing, since they had not had many opportunities lately of being together, to see B before he left. She hears that, having made the long drive, for which he could barely manage to find time, on purpose to say goodbye to her, he was naturally rather put out to find that she was not in the house and that his time had been wasted. He had actually waited half an hour, expecting her to return. At last, as there was no way of knowing how long it would be before she put in an appearance, and as his own business was urgent, he had gone off looking cross and aggrieved. In fact he had left a message to say that he was most disappointed and upset about the whole matter.

  Very distressed at the way her good intentions have gone wrong, B consoles herself with the prospect of getting the entire complex straightened out as soon as he comes back. But then she remembers that he will not be returning until the following week, and that by that time she herself will probably be away from home.

  Once more the suburban house THE ELMS, the desirable residence. The trees have grown slightly taller. It�
��s raining. Saturated soft lawn, like a green sponge; black tree-trunks glistening with rain. The wet brick walls of the house: the paint on the doors and window frames is less fresh than it used to be; but this would hardly be noticeable.

  A general view of the house in its trees, roofs of adjacent houses appearing on all sides through the trees. Tree-tops are doleful in grey and cold douche and drench of rain; leaves are bent under weight of raindrops, tipped, freed and weighted again; the roof, the whole slant of tiles, swims under a thin film of water, rain slithers thinly to gutters, gurgles in pipes and gutters, trickles from vent-pipes, seeps into sodden earth. Raindrops spatter a puddle beside the porch. A blind taps on a half-open window its untranslatable message.

  Now inside. It’s no particular season or time of day. The rooms are chilly, somewhat dark because of the dark sky reflected in windows steadily blurring with rain. The recent thud of the front door perpetually hangs suspended in feeble blind-tapping, rain noise. Most of the rooms are unoccupied. Outmoded and unloved knick-knacks haunt the dusted drawing-room with desolate derelict neatness; the oriental boxes empty, the fretted sandalwood fan folded in exile. Encamped behind the closed kitchen doors two women servants, shut off with cups of tea, gossip and sip; they seem unconnected with the rest of the house; nor is the house affected by their presence there.

  Solitary B wanders aimlessly from room to room. She is making a tour of boredom, loneliness, monotony, dullness, although she’s not conscious of it. In room after room the rain filming on all grey windows; gloss-hard or padded gentility of heavy furnishings; genteel formal masculine room, smell of telephone, leather, tobacco; aloof genteel diningroom glinting of silver.

  B finally goes to her own room, stands for a minute fingers drumming the window-pane swimming in rain, then sits down on the bed, opens a book.