A slowly turns the door handle. And this door too she shuts very carefully and quietly behind her as she goes out into the garden of THE ELMS, where the gardener is cutting the edge of the grass with a pair of long-handled shears. She stands on the lawn quite close to him, watching the snipped grass blades fall on the gravel. She has the air of wishing to know with some part of her attention just how the shears are manipulated: but from this fractional escape her real ego stands always dissociated. The gardener does not look up. He wears an old soft-brimmed straw hat, his back is stiff, his head bent, the snicking rhythm of the shears does not hesitate.
While he stolidly goes on clipping, a car pulls up in front of the porch, the chauffeur gets out and rings the bell, the suburban lady steps down from the car, the maid comes to open the door of the house. These four people, the visitor, the gardener, the chauffeur, the maid, each wearing a similar mask-face under straw hat, hat with bird in it, peaked cap, muslin cap, are grouped together a few yards from A. The tableau holds in suspense while all the masks slowly swing towards A and remain fixed. Fright starting to appear on her face, A looks from one to the other, turns round, hurries away. As she goes out of the gate, the branches of the elms at each side reach out fumbling at her, their long arms fingered with groping leaves. A leaf falls: she begins running; others fall. Magnified, not in size but in prominence, dead leaves eddy to-and-fro on the ground, cluster in dusty drifts, scamper singly away.
And against a lead sky the bare tree-tops are labouring.
Are you afraid of the tigers? Do you hear them padding all round you on their fierce fine velvet feet?
The speed of the growth of tigers in the nightland is a thing which ought to be investigated some time by the competent authority. You start off with one, about the size of a mouse, and before you know where you are he’s twice the size of the Sumatra tiger which defeats all comers in that hemisphere. And then, before you can say Knife (not a very tactful thing to say in the circumstances anyhow), all his boy and girl friends are gathered round, your respectable quiet decorous docile night turns itself into a regular tiger-garden. Wherever you look, the whole night is full of tigers leaping and loping and grooming their whiskers and having a wonderful time at your expense. There isn’t a thing you can do about it apparently.
The wilder the tricks of the tigers, the more abandoned their games and gambols, the more diversely dreadful become the dooms of the unfortunate A in this dream. Her fugitive shape, black-swathed, vanishes at the end of every cul-de-sac. Through the cities of the world she pursues her fate, in streets where the dead eyes of strangers are no colder than the up-swarming lights which have usurped the brilliance of the stars. From shrouded platforms among the clouds she hurtles down. She plunges from towers strict and terrible in their stark fragile strength, delicate as jerboa’s bones on the sky, perdurable with granite and steel. Slumped on his stained bar, Pete the Greek, beneath flyblown Christmas festoons which no one will ever remove, hears the screaming skid of wheels spouting slush with her blood. Limp as an old coat not worth a hanger, she is to be found behind numbered doors in hotel bedrooms; or dangling from the trees of country churchyards where leaning tombstones like feeble-minded ghosts mop and mow in the long summer grass. The weeds of lonely rivers bind her with clammy skeins; the tides of tropical oceans suck off her shoes; crabs scuttle over her eye sockets. Sheeted and anonymous on rubbered wheels she traverses the interminable bleakness of chloroform-loaded corridors. The sardonic yap of the revolver can be taken as the full stop arbitrarily concluding each ambiguous sentence.
An erratic but steadfast seeking, saraband and stalking of death by violence through the indifferent world. The dance enters upon a movement of weariness, desperation, finale. Just what its form, gesture and detail being variable and in no way permanent. For the occasion may be supposed a town house of a particular type, in an unfashionable, cheap district, a lodging-house possibly. There will be the area, spearheaded railings, crammed dustbins vomiting refuse; the street air stale in the unsweet warm evening; grimy, strident-voiced children, tired and cantankerous, quarrelling at their play. The house door, in need of painting, shabbily formal like a neglected and desecrated altar beneath the fanlight carrying the street number; perhaps a small bed-and-breakfast sign at one side. Inside, the hall, narrow, in gloom, worn linoleum double-tracked towards stairs and basement; a smell here of unappetizing meals, cabbage water and of the mackintosh hooked to the hatrack. A glazed pottery drainpipe, painted with bulrushes, used as umbrella-stand.
The staircase plods upwards, flagging at every flight, the creaking treads sustained by dirt-coloured felt, trampled threadbare. At the top the back bedroom, dismal with furniture discards from many rooms; cluttered with glasses, cups, empty whisky and gin bottles; syringes, scattered tablets, powders spilled from their crumpled papers, needles, empty tubes labelled diamorph., etc., litter the floor. At the sash window, the dingy scum-white lace with the entangled light strangling meanly in it: on the brass bedstead, huddled bedclothes in disorder, beneath which the stiff, frightening shape of some human form can barely, inexorably, be discerned. A wicked black frieze of cowls and chimney-pots beyond the lightly air-sucked curtain, jagged angles of roofs and gables iron-sharp on the sky. The vacant, exhausted sky, like an old shell.
MY mother’s death made no difference to the house except that she herself was no longer in it. At least her outward presence had gone away. Her sadness and her boredom stayed in the quiet rooms where I lived alone with shadows. As if they felt lonely, these two ghosts attached themselves to me and entered my night-time world. Sometimes I thought they had taken me for my mother, and I felt nearer to her through their nearness. Sometimes it seemed as if her departure had brought her too near. Sometimes her nearness was like a hand on my shoulder; then I felt frightened, and ran and jumped and turned somersaults even, trying to shake off her hand. But the hand always stayed on my shoulder as long as it wished to.
Sometimes, looking out of an upstairs window, I could feel my mother looking out of my eyes. Like people who from a bridge watch fish swimming below them, we saw the outside world as an alien element where we could take no part. Isolated behind the glass of our lonely window we looked down on the daily life which was not for us.
SHOUTING AND SINGING and hullooing his satellites the gregarious sun comes ranting upon the collective stage. After so many billion repetitions you might expect him to be getting the least bit perfunctory: but not he; no sirree. Like a conscientious actor determined to give the public full value for money, he rampages through his performance as enthusiastically as the first time he put on the act. Of course the rest of the cast plays up to him. The clouds jump to their opening positions, hurriedly snatching the gaudy properties of the cooperative scarf dance. On earth ocean bellows to ocean across the continents like allied commanders exchanging a salute of guns. The mutual greetings of the archipelagoes are more intime.
As the sunwaves break over the roof of the jungle, flocks of parrots burst upward from the dark teeming mass like an explosion of rockets. The monkey village yawns, fornicates, pinches, scratches, chatters itself awake. In honeycombed caves the glow-worms conglomerate starrily. In linked caves, between clotted stalactites, the bats hang themselves up together. The gentle pandas in their dainty dress indulge in party frolics among the rocks.