The ashy remnant of what was once cherry blossom continues to rain through the blackness while the accompanying noise expands, spouts and crackles into an ear-splitting engine-roar. As this shattering thunder becomes quite unbearable, it explodes into silence. At the same instant the whirling formlessness bursts into a shower of leaflets which are catapulted in all directions. They drift downwards, and there is a momentary glimpse of them sucked and eddying madly in the up-draught of a flaming jungle village, fired palm trees ablaze and streaming. Vacuum.
LATER we crossed the sea to a colder country where my mother was bored and sad. We lived in a house fall of things kept brightly polished. Visitors admired the house and everything in it. Most of all they admired my mother. She was like a queen in the house — a princess in exile. All the shine of the house was quenched by my mother’s sadness. It was not a gay house in spite of the bright things in it. No, the house was not really gay at all.
THE DREAM scene comes to light as a comprehensive view of a garden suburb seen from the air. The whole layout is visible. At one extremity the conglomeration of city outskirts: slums, factories, converging tram, train, bus routes, arterial roads. At the other end the opening countryside: fields, scattered industrial areas, a golf course, a few hills and small woods. Then a closer view of the suburb. It’s a high-class residential district. The streets are wide and planted with trees, the geometrical rows of houses stand in neat gardens, there is a busy shopping centre, solid neo-Georgian municipal buildings, a crescent of fake Tudor houses in herringbone brick disguises, business premises. It’s summer. A windy and sunny day. All the gardens are spick-and-span with orderly flower-beds and lawns carefully mown. A few have tennis courts; others have pools, rockeries, sundials, effigies of rabbits, toadstools or gnomes. Some, not many, tradesmen’s vans and shiny private cars sliding along the roads. A bus draws itself smoothly past the public gardens. Smoke rises in fat curlicues from prosperous chimneys. More insistent than anything, dwarfing the whole scene to papier-mâché cuteness, the enormous blue undisciplined sky with robustious clouds bucketing across.
A straight view of one of the widest streets from ground-level follows.
A dark limousine, an eight-year-old model, but beautifully kept, is being driven along this street by a chauffeur in hogskin gloves. A white gate with THE ELMS painted on the top bar. Appropriate elm trees at each side. The gate is hooked open. The car makes a careful curve and drives in. A glimpse of lawn; cutting the edge of the grass with long-handled shears, a gardener, who glances up with skimming non-interest. The front door comes into prominence with porch and flanking hydrangeas in pots. The car stops; chauffeur gets out of his seat, rings the door bell, comes back and opens the door of the car from which emerges a lady of no particular age, dressed for paying a call. Her dress and hat are expensive, very much toned-down versions of the season’s fashionable styles. A maid in white afternoon apron and cap opens the house door for her.
All these people, the lady, the chauffeur, the gardener, the maid, have the same face which they wear as if it were a mask, indifferent, decorous, nondescript, and quietly, negatively repressive. If the chauffeur and his employer were to change clothes no one would notice the difference.
Meanwhile, a door opens into the usual drawingroom, arranged with half-taste, too many knick-knacks, too many vases of flowers. The casement windows have chintz curtains and the same material has been used for covering the sofa and chairs. The room only differs from other suburban drawingrooms because a good deal of the bric-à-brac comes from the East.
The visitor sits down with her feet close together. She has been in the room before. As she takes off her gloves and smooths the creases out of them, she glances about the room, stamping it with the tepid pass of her recognition.
After a minute the door opens and the mistress of the house — for the sake of economy she may as well be called A — comes in. She is nearing forty, her still young face is attractive in spite of the discontent harassing it. During a rather long-drawn-out pause she stands in the doorway at the far end of the room. There is plenty of time to observe her. The details of her appearance become clearly defined; narrow neurotic face under bright curled hair, uneasy hands, plain light dress very simple compared with the visitor’s outfit. This woman’s restless, artistic personality is considerably over-emphasized by contrast with the mediocre, phlegmatic mask-face worn by all the others. However, she seems a little too dramatic to be quite convincing. There is a suggestion of planned exhibitionism about her pose in the doorway which is so prolonged as to produce an effect of tension. As she at last shuts the door quietly and comes forward, in dream fashion the room gradually heightens and elongates: at the same time an invisible sponge passes over it, eliminating detail; windows are blotted out one after another till only a single tall window remains, admitting a flat neutral light, between stiff fluted curtains: so that she advances into a long, cold, lofty, uncoloured room which is empty except for the unaltered chintz chair where the visitor sits and one or two other indistinct objects which symbolize furniture.
With each step A takes, a modification, corresponding to what’s happening in the room, progresses in her own appearance. All her tragic potentialities are brought out and accentuated. She grows taller and thinner, her face chalk-white and haggard, her hair curls into a stiff sacrificial crown. Even her dress changes colour, turning red-black, so that she eventually stands like a dark pillar in front of the blank window. She has her back to the room and to the visitor who has remained sitting in the flowery armchair, feet side by side, smoothing the creases out of her folded gloves.
How you must miss it all, the visitor says.
Synchronizing with her perfectly commonplace voice, the light starts to grow dim, diminishing steadily until the room becomes quite dark except for the luminous window against the lower part of which, in the exact centre, A’s sombre silhouette remains standing throughout, absolutely motionless.
How you must miss it all, the visitor says.
The romance of the East, a precisely similar voice says, answering, in precisely the same ladylike, banal, superficial tone. From different parts of the room other identical voices eject similar comments: The colour, The mystery, The gay social life, and so on. As each voice speaks, a pasty finger of light rambles towards it, just barely indicating repetitive replicas of the original caller and establishing the existence of a chorus distributed round the darkroom. Every time the light touches a new speaker she is shown sitting with consciously crossed ankles, consciously ladylike, her face tilted to vacancy, smiling the conventional vapid smile of the afternoon visitor.
While this goes on, the view outside the window, materializing from nothing, presents a sequence of Far-Eastern scenes dissolving into one another, tremendously fast, immensely disorganized. It is never possible to grasp these visions completely (they are partly hidden by the black shape standing with her back to the room) because of their speed and the confused way in which they evolve themselves at all angles and on different size scales.
For instance: a minuscule landscape with palms and temples, instantly smothered by the overflowing of a gigantic yellow river in spate; slither of water yeastily regurgitating refuse and half-seen domestic objects; rafts on which families are living, fishing, washing, cooking, sleeping, engaging in intimate occupations of all descriptions, suddenly soar upwards like magic carpets: a tangle of upside-down horses’ legs racing; intersecting arcs of swung polo-sticks swooping: ambiguous smiling bland oriental faces: gathering of Very Important People (white, most of them, but a sprinkling of highly decorated and jewelled nabobs in magnificent costumes for picturesque local colour); personages with orders; uniforms; elaborately dressed women. Then, getting more tangled and chaotic, a crazy avalanche of flowers, mosquito nets, champagne bottles, electric fans: hands carrying trays, golf bags, rackets, wraps; guns, whips; white hands, brown hands, yellow hands; hands lighting cigarettes, cigars; holding weapons, holding glasses, holding reins, rackets, bats, sticks, clubs; holding other hands: mouths with lipstick, with moustaches, with thick lips, with thin lips; Eastern mouths, Western mouths; mouths shouting orders, kissing, singing, drinking, whispering: liners, trains, cars, tongas, traps; baggage, horses, mules, bullocks, sampans, rickshaws; children, dogs, coolies, ayahs: ships sailing, troops marching, storms breaking, doors opening, moons rising, suns setting, trees blowing; dust-storms, thunderstorms; meetings, intrigues, assignations, partings.