Slight transitional pause. Next view is downwards from landing to hall (looking down steep-diving staircase), on the two foreshortened figures, the man’s egg-head with incipient bald tonsure spot. The woman hustles him into professorial gown, jerks, tugs, pats, brushes him off; takes his hand, leads him out of the front door. Through this open door is seen a sliver of venomous green-raffia stage grass.
Chug-chug sound of a child playing at cars; high-pitched tooting horn; the woman reappears in the doorway, watching departure; her watchfulness holds for a few seconds. The woman turning, comes back inside; closing the door, the lock snicks shut; ripping loose apron-strings. The apron falls on the floor. Denting it with her high heels she walks over it to the wall-mirror, extracts a lipstick from gold-mesh bag, starts to repaint her mouth. In the mirror, close-up of her enormously enlarged brilliant moist raw red mouth, suggestive of fancified genital organ.
Now a complete change of scene. The professor has reached the college and is lecturing to his class. He stands on a dais behind a desk on which is a carafe of water and a tin trumpet. He is not quite tall enough for the height of the desk and so he stands on an old-fashioned church hassock with flaps at the ends. To his left, on the wall behind him, a large blackboard scrawled over with undecipherable words and symbols in coloured chalks. (Conceivably some of these might be semi-intelligible words related to escapism; and one or two of the scribbles could be kindergarten obscenities, faces, figures.) On the right a phenomenally tall blank frosted-glass window reaches clear from floor to high domed ceiling. It holds its pair of stiff white fluted curtains rigidly to its sides in arms-downward-stretch position. Semicircular tiers of benches rising in front. The back of each bench forms a continuous curved shelf for the books of the row above. Only two tiers towards the centre are occupied. (There could be a suggestion of upper and lower dentures in this.) The students are masks: upper row masculine, feminine lower. Except for the sex differentiation, which appears mainly in the arrangement and length of the painted hair, all are identical, characterless, with wide round eyes of respectful admiration, adulation, attention. The masks supported on spinal columns of spiral wire: similar wires representing arms terminated by limp chamois glove-hands half-stuffed with cotton. The hands are laid flat on the bookrests with books between; all are motionless.
The professor’s voice continuous wordless booming punctuated by an occasional NOW or YOU SEE. Sudden short tinny interjection of sound as he picks up toy trumpet and blows. Followed by immediate lifting and reaching out of curtain arms from the window, one arm to each row of students, arms gliding smoothly over the rows of limp glove-hands, touching off each hand in turn, retiring swiftly to the original attention posture at window. There is a faint twanging noise of quivering wires while the gloves are left gangling in palsied mimicry of jittery handwriting and the professor takes a long drink of water.
A resumption of the professorial booming (for a very short period this time), with attention gradually concentrating on the curtains, which appear holding themselves with watchdog vigilance at their window post. Climax comes with the curtains coiling, the curtain tentacles extending, delicately glissading along the mask rows, turning the masks to the blackboard (the professor chalks up O); masks spectrally twitching and trilling in twisted unison; the curtain arms coil high to the ceiling, weave there; then return to the window, to stiff and full arm’s-length attention at each side of window, resume the same tense rigidity as before. As the wire vibration dies down, one after another, the masks topple, tumble, tip out of sight behind the benches. As the last one disappears the professor comes down from the hassock, from the dais, walks to the door of the lecture room.
Four seconds after he has gone out of the door the left curtain slowly draws itself across half the window. The right curtain slowly crosses to meet it.
A series of transient views tracks the professor’s progress from lecture room to outer door of college. His black-moth-gown seen fluttering down long perspective of shadowed, tunnel-like stone corridor; emerging into high-groined and vaulted entrance hall, the grey stones of the floor with faint localized stippling of amethyst, topaz, ruby light spillings from stained-glass windows.
Numerous indistinct indications of other figures, gowned professors, student masks topping garments on coat-hangers, wires, hockey-sticks; all flickering spasmodically in different directions; all very indefinite, ephemeral.
Finally, a static black-and-white punctuation mark, a heavy dark ancient door under gothic arch. An old man’s gnarled, unsteady, veined hand with border of frayed shirt-cuff, wear-shined and threadbare porter’s sleeve, draws back bolts, turns key, loosens chain, with rusty rasping, jarring complaint of unoiled metal.
The door slowly opens.
First the pepper-and-salt trousers, then the whole of the professor, stepping out of the door, crossing empty and sunlit pavement in the cracks of which wild flowers, daisies, harebells, cowslips, primroses, are in bloom. A toy motor-car, painted red, stands at the kerb. The professor packs and stuffs and forces himself into it; settles his feet on the pedals; squeezes a captious toot out of the rubber horn-bulb; vigorously pedals off. There is a squeaky noise from the chain driving the wire-spoked wheels. Short distance up street he signals with left arm stiffly extended; turns left, disappears. The chain squeak briefly outlasts him.
Now the professor pedalling home through the quiet streets of the town; not a real-life town, of course. The sunshine is filtered through pink gauze. Colleges, churches, museums, etc., like birthday cakes in the gauzy light. Cuckoos fly out of belfries and cupolas as the clocks strike.
The professor keeps on pedalling, passes the entrance to a street which is in shadow. Glimpse down this street, emphasizing its shadowed contrast to the rest of the town. About two hundred yards along it, facing another way, a mass of full-sized people crowds silently outside a municipal building, a town hall or a police station, very dark-looking, very ominous, introducing an abrupt note of alarm. The professor does not look. He keeps on pedalling.
The sunlit street ribbons on unbroken down a gentle slope with the white play-block house at the end of it. The car, without free-wheel, running faster and faster downhill; the professor’s knees pistoning faster and faster, almost grazing his chin.
Inside the house the woman who appeared earlier on is playing mah-jong with three visitors. These people are seen only in profile and are feminine, bloodless; with long proboscis noses, like Javanese silhouettes stamped out of metal, very frigidly and ophidianly malignant. The mah-jong tiles forming the walls behind which they are sitting are covered with money symbols, deeds, bonds, coins of various currencies; power symbols, sceptres, whips, bribes, $$$$ins; diapers, feeding bottles; phallic signs.
Rapid survey of this somewhat provincial pretentious drawing-room of a would-be-modern intellectual. Smooth, pale, faintly glazed planes of walls, built-in furniture, unstained woods: squarish, low, upholstered couch; easy chairs covered in zebra-stripe fabric: the emasculate fireplace, without mantelpiece, without fire, meekly impounded by chaste light wood bands: wall alcoves, interiorly tinted, and displaying such objects as negro carvings and/or very consciously quaint period pieces, china dogs, red and blue glinting lustres, wax flowers under fragile cloches. Bookshelves with volumes of philosophy, psychology by the more superficial writers, books issued by “advanced” publishers, a few up-to-the-moment novels, poems, pamphlets, “advanced” publications generally, a few literary quarterlies and art papers. There would be not more than two or three not-very-original paintings in pale frames on the walls: still life of the slick Slade student apple-and-wine-glass variety, or etiolated impressionist water-colour, or possibly pastel-smudged portrait or overloaded oil landscape in crude colour discords. There would probably be an absence of flowers in the room; or perhaps a single white pottery jar of tall grasses or shell flowers.