The sun has just set and the sky is still faintly pink in the west behind a low blurring dust-haze; elsewhere it is a very limpid and unimpassioned shade of delicate lime-green. In the segment of sky opposite the sunset, above the crenellated horizon, a star, at first only just visible, growing momentarily brighter, assumes an elongated shape like a candle-flame. It is at first the only star to be seen: but very soon another, another, and then another, make their appearance. Towards this cross-shaped constellation, across the plateau in the fading light, a procession of vaguely feminine forms moves slowly on foot. The leader raises her hand in encouragement or in exhortation, points to the four stars. So swift is the passing of the subsequent flash that it is impossible to say whether ring or stars originated the light.
The pilgrimage continues to follow the stars which grow larger and brighter, more strangely shaped
until they reveal themselves as candle-flames in a small dark room with no windows or doors visible. The walls are scrawled over with dimly-seen symbols, pentacles, wands, swords, etc. There are shelves of books: a few phantom-glimmering shapes of vases or urns. B sits on the floor, reading by the light of the four candles set in their cross-shaped holder.
The Liaison Officer in his smart uniform is preparing to read out of his book again. There is the impression hanging about the dream that he has just finished a part of his lecture or sermon or whatever it is, and is about to start on something new. This he does, by reading in a clear cold voice which has perhaps grown somewhat more authoritarian in its inflexion.
Many people have said that retreats are undesirable and that they should be abolished because their existence constitutes a threat to the supremacy of the authorities whose powers ought to be absolute. But when a man says that he is going into retreat it does not mean he is evading the law, which is an impossibility anyhow: it means that he is effecting a change of authority, a transfer from one set of laws to another set at least equally mysterious and severe — so that he is certainly not making an escape of any sort. All that these retreats do is afford an alternative code, no less exacting and quite as incomprehensible as the one held in more general observance. But when it comes to the attitude of the authorities towards such institutions — here, I think, we are getting out of our depth.
In this connection it could be argued: if the authorities really are supreme, why should they permit the continued existence of a system which competes with their own? Is it not much more likely that the retreats are licensed by the authorities because, in some inscrutable way, they play their part in the established order?
There is even the possibility that the regime of the retreats, although it appears (superficially at least) totally different, is nothing but a disguised version of the regulations in force outside. This theory, improbable as it sounds, is supported by the fact that in certain contingencies the two spheres of authority indubitably converge, and perhaps even merge into one another if the critical nature of the emergency warrants it. But these eventualities are so rare and so little understood, the whole subject is so complicated by ambiguity and obscurity, that speculation is necessarily vague.
Actually, one is tempted to believe that the authorities are so perspicacious, so ingenious, that they have devised this method of tricking into conformity with the law people who might otherwise prove recalcitrant and badly adjusted. It is easy to see how a person of this type, thinking only of his own idiosyncrasies, would fall into the trap. He imagines that by going into retreat he will change his allegiance. And, indeed, once he is inside he becomes docile and content, believing that the old authorities control him no longer.
Meanwhile they, in a stronger position than ever, merely congratulate themselves on the success of their stratagem. The fact that their victory has been won in secret is immaterial; why should they, being all-powerful, wish to make an open display of their powers? All that they wanted has now been skilfully and pacifically achieved.
I hid my face in the lap of darkness like a lost child brought at last to his mother. Never again would I stray into the light: never again would I trust myself to a place where even those who sold their birthright for safety were not secure.
THE DREAMSCAPE languidly opens up. Conspectus of university town; early morning mist slowly clearing. The mist dispersal not mere evaporation but a sort of gradual unswathing, very gentle protracted tearing, rolling up and discarding, as of webs or excessively fragile tissue paper, disclosing buildings in careful succession. This process, though necessarily long-drawn out, progresses methodically with a certain businesslike efficiency. Enough should be seen of it to suggest the practised unpacking and setting out of, say, a stock of valuable china.
View narrows to disclosure, from the ground upwards, of one particular tower. As mist wrappings are removed, there appears, on a carved ledge, a row of plump pigeons fast asleep with heads under their wings. Then, sighted up the shaft of the tower as if from its foot, the remote rococo summit, which in a second starts to revolve, discharges a musical-box carillon of tinkling notes which dance off, frisky white minims and semibreves, into the now blue sky. Back for a moment to the pigeons, untucking themselves, yawning, blinking, sleepily stretching their wings.
Now a switchover to an outlying residential street of the same town. Ahead, set back from the road in small flowerless lawn garden, a new white flat-roofed modem house, determinedly unembellished, simple rectangles superimposed like a construction of nursery building blocks. A path of concrete slabs leads to the front door which has a chromium ring, O-shaped, instead of a handle.
Inside, in one of the bedrooms upstairs, a child’s cot. It is white, with bars at the sides; a brightly painted cock decorates the headboard, an owl the foot; the occupant lies motionless under puffed pale-blue eiderdown. Across the floor, which is covered in some hygienic greyish composition of cork or rubber, comes a tall brass-like woman of forty, her face somewhat like a photo of one of the hostesses seen in society papers; looking like and dressed like a hybrid nurse and socialite; her plucked eyebrows very arched, her lips painted bright red; costumed as if for a cocktail party; wearing a mackintosh apron tied round her waist.
In a series of brisk efficient motions she approaches the cot; lets down the side (with harsh buzz-saw rasp); bends stiff from the waist, her tightly sheathed hind parts glossy in taut satin; turns back the eiderdown. With her hard hands she reaches inside the woolly-white, lamb’s-wool coverings (peeling them off as if they were part of a parcel or a cocoon) and grasps firmly, and after a moment lifts out a manikin, adeptly supported by her large hands under buttocks and shoulder-blades, dressed in grey-mottled and baggy tweeds: she sits on a chair; the manikin held on her knee and balancing there, limp dangling feet turned in like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The woman zips open her diamanté-trimmed corsage; pulls out a long rubbery phallus-shaped nipple from the glans of which a few flakes of sawdust scale off; inserts this in the dummy’s mouth in the style of a petrol feed.
Shot of the little pursed rosebud mouth under shaved upper lip busily sucking away (with lip-smacking and belching accompaniment). The pose held in gruesome travesty of madonna and child tableau. While this goes on the manikin visibly swelling, swelling, swelling; till at the end of the meal he is almost a full-sized man. The woman stands him on the floor while she tucks away the flaccid phallus-teat, zips up her dress, stands up.