From far away down the centre of a dark street-crevice between huge skyscrapers, a small group of men and women appear unevenly, wearily marching: they are slight, poorly dressed, insignificant, utterly dwarfed by the monstrous size of the buildings. Rows of indignant, indifferent, glum or frightened faces watch them from the kerb; but these hastily fade out before the arrival of a troop of giant policemen. A thin batlike whimper flitters between the enormous walls as the demonstrators are clubbed off the street.
Now an elderly middle-class couple pottering along the sidewalk arm-in-arm. Both are neat, frail, not well-to-do, intensely respectable. The old lady carries a shopping basket, the old man is using his umbrella as a cane in his free hand. They look like two old people up from the country as they advance, glancing timidly at the buildings and the crowds who hurry past without noticing them. Finally they come to a halt in front of tall ornate closed double doors where the word BANK is visible on the scrolled ironwork. The old man approaches and reads a small placard which hangs in the middle of the shut doors; his mouth slowly drops open; he stands staring at the notice for a minute, not believing, not taking it in; then comes back bewildered with unsteady gait to confer with the old woman. The inevitable brutishfaced armed policeman beside the door watches them in scornful aloofness, swinging his truncheon. After a while the old man pulls himself together, steps up and says something to the policeman who, cynically narrowing his eyes, dribbles a few words out of the comer of his mouth almost without lip movement. The old fellow lingers in dazed appeal until the other’s callous attitude dawns on him; drifts forlornly back to his companion. They stand side by side, dumb, as if lost or stunned, while rain starts to fall and the policeman looks on, leaning against the doorjamb. The old man becomes aware of the umbrella he is holding; then of its use; his hands twitch at it paralytically; he unfurls it at last and automatically raises it over the old lady’s head; takes her arm again; vaguely leads her off through the rain. The policeman looks after them, swings his truncheon, moves farther back under shelter of the portico; yawns.
Immediately after the departure of the old people, a few yards up the street, a girl hurries out of a doorway. Turning to wave good-bye to someone behind her, she runs towards a bus which is approaching the stopping-place, slips, loses her balance, trips over the edge of the wet kerb into the road. A cruising taxi squeals into a ghastly skid just as it is upon her, the driver pounding a frantic yowl out of his horn. A high shrilling momentarily punctures the traffic roar, cuts off sharply. One or two people start running; others shove and crane between the umbrellas to see what has happened. The policeman saunters up heavily, scattering everyone with the swing of his huge bruise-blue shoulders, swinging his truncheon.
The dream closes in to the central dead spot.
With delayed, lingering uncertainty this is disclosed as perhaps a web spun with grey mist-fibres of involution; perhaps a carcinoma; perhaps some sort of transparent maze. As uncertainty concentrates, involution honeycombs into greatest possible number of hexagonal cells on pyramidal base. As the honeycomb crystallizes, the cells quickly expand, differentiate; involution, now occupying the entire visual field, defines into… catacombs…? hospital…? prison…? town with antique northern buildings.
Narrow streets, spires, quadrangles, stabilize cool in still grey light; so peaceful and so extremely quiet, remote, that they seem suspended in crystal. Calm in soft pigeon-coloured stone, overlooking a lawn formal with spaced mulberry trees, a gothic façade pierced by slender windows, old, secure, rigorously remote. Figures stroll in and out of doorways, cloisters, with very faint droning accompaniment of academic discourse, distant sporadic chimings of clocks and bells. The speakers’ voices are subdued, their tones unhurried, unheated, their cadences falling. Brief snatches of talk; such topics as the abstract entities, Wren’s interiors, the migration of wild geese to Spitsbergen. Presently a more sustained ringing, bell-sounding from the high towers, reverberates with gentleness and solemnity. The figures continue to move up and down for perhaps half a minute longer: then quietly drift away.
The secluded scene is disintegrating, is blurred out, it reverts to the dead spot: the town is dissolving, it amalgamates with the dead spot (so that there is here, suddenly, the blank central eye-blur again): only the perimetral area is pulsing now at ominous speed and with the ominous growing tension of tomtom beats steadily increasing in tempo though not in loudness.
This the dream college points with the man behind the barbed-wire hunted by more and more panic, running more and more awkwardly, undirectedly, his glasses falling, his eyes screaming out of the horror of his foredoomed and sweating face.
Glued to his face, biting it to bloody bits, now presses the turgid mouth of a great thick black salivary-shiny gun: the megrimed retina pulps and gushes into the dead spot spattered with brains and buttons and the grey blur still pumping.
Clear but very dimunitive vision across the convulsing of this man-spattered superopticity, a quadrangle, empty, under watery cool clean evening sky. Lighted windows appear one after the other.
Which is being stored up? Which is being selected? Is it a quiet précis of monastic routine unwinding its neutral and satin-smooth spool of days snarled by nothing more serious than the easily unravelled knot of an examination?
Perhaps one could find out in some textbook? perhaps the Herr Professor would be able to tell us?
Does the brain choose the images to be retained? Or does the memory rest on a psychological trestle that can be pushed in any direction?
At the instant of balance, when the scale trembles between the polarities of night and day; what is it that returns?
The light rain showering in sunlight while we sheltered under the archway; and went on over green velvet grass, between mulberry trees: and strapped books on the carriers of bicycles or piled them in baskets fixed to the handlebars, on our way to the evening, to drink coffee, and to talk for hours.
And when we were sentimental, standing in front of the house where he used to live, the poet, the tears came in our eyes, and we were uplifted. We said to one another, We too will write beautiful words, we will be remembered. And we felt uplifted. While you are young you have splendid pure feelings. Afterwards it’s different, there are various euphonic substitutes.
Which are the prints to be pasted into the album out of the jumbled snapshots?
Traveller on the world’s oceans, in waking do you know the sea which rocks your temporary bed, or whether the shadow of the tropic bird or of the stormy petrel sidles across the deck? There are certain pictures which did not fade or get thrown away Look at the pictures quickly And you will catch your morning bird soaring above the towers, you will see your shadow fly over choristers and midsummer morning bells from the tower at the bridgehead.
There was a poem written for me on my comb; written very small with the nib of a pen used for mapping. And when we drifted in the punt, late, in the backwater, I combed my hair, and I was Orlando, I was not man nor girl, and I was Ariel, drifting between the worlds, and a poem in my hair.
I do not know why I must keep these pictures small eyes, mad eyes that should have been starry the lovely danger waiting beneath the lime tree or faces cheating as they pass by, frozen for ever in their fraudulent smiles with the clocks striking an uncounted hour masks