Mud was beginning to spatter the worn toes of his shoes. And he observed spatters of mud on the white stockings of women.
How could one project, in satisfactory form, this desire for annihilation?
Not in suicide, but in imagination?
A small boy in a blue sailor suit, with a knotted silk tie, and spots of mashed potato on the blouse—and a round sailor hat on the back of his head—himself that small boy—years and years and years before—
He stared in at the shop window in Liberty Street, the toyshop window. There were battleships of cardboard, lead soldiers slotted in rows in a cardboard box, a toy combination bank of steel, a red and yellow tin monkey, with a red cap, who depended with prayerful paws from a cord, a pile of comic valentines, an air-rifle, a box of BB shot. But there was also, in the middle, a goldfish bowl, bright in the light, filled with crystal-clear water. It was otherwise empty—moveless, still, eternal. He read, slowly, a second time, then a third, the placard. Two water-snakes had inhabited this bowl. Of a sudden, obeying a simultaneous impulse, they had begun eating each other’s tails. They had thus formed a ring, which, as they devoured, became smaller. Smaller and smaller this ring of snake had become—till at last, as each snake performed the final swallow, they had both abruptly vanished. They were gone. Gone into the infinite. And here, of course, was the bowl of water to prove it.
Yes, some such action as this would now be the perfect, the appropriate action. Some such image of annihilation, the giving of form to some such concept of flight from reality—this would be a divine relief.
A nest of sodden matches in the gutter as he stepped across.
Ghosts, for example. A ghost, or sequence of ghosts, reality with each progression becoming less real. Would this be an image for what it was that he desired?
Three men sitting apart in the compartment of an English train, an English train dawdling through sleepy sunlit country. Hop-fields with multitudes of upright poles; and geometrical designs of twine, laced and interlaced, like a cat’s-cradle, for the vines. Oast-houses, cowled like nuns, with their air of brooding alertness, as if they expected something from the southwest. Cottages of orange-lichened tiles, and fields of sheep.
Time hung heavy; time hung palpably; the train stopped, gently panting, for a long while at a small station, where empty milk-cans were clanked on to the asphalt platform. Except for this sound, everything was profoundly still. One of the three passengers in the smoking compartment put down his Daily Mirror and looked out of the window. He smiled a little, to himself, as if pleased with some secret cleverness of his own; then glanced amusedly at each of his fellow passengers. The one opposite him was looking at an Ordnance Survey map. The other one, at the other side of the carriage, was staring out at the landscape.
“Now I suppose,” said the smiling one, “you don’t believe in ghosts?”
The man addressed in this surprising fashion lowered his map. He eyed his vis-à-vis suspiciously. The idea of a conversation seemed somewhat repugnant to him.
“Ghosts?” he said, raising his eyebrows rather superciliously.
“Yes, ghosts. You probably don’t believe in them?”
“It all depends on what you mean by believing?”
The third man turned his head sharply, uneasily, toward the two talkers, and then as sharply away again. He appeared to be annoyed. The train gently, imperceptibly, began to move from the station. The black and white sign slid past—“Ham Street.”
“There’s an article in this paper about ghosts. The writer says that he has seen many ghosts—hundreds of them—and that they are never, in appearance, human. Mere wisps of fog. Or the usual sort of hobgoblin thing you read about in shilling shockers. He doesn’t believe there is any such thing as a human ghost.… Do you agree with him?”
The man with the map merely grunted and allowed his moving eyes to follow the moving fields and cherry orchards. His interlocutor, baffled, gave a little laugh of annoyance. But he was not so easily to be put down.
“I see that you don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.
“I didn’t say I didn’t,” said the other.
“Ah, but I can see that you don’t.… And the joke is, you know, that I am a ghost.”
He delivered this statement with widening bright eyes and an air of great triumph, smiling delightedly. But, though the third passenger, at the other side of the compartment, gave a distinct start, his chosen victim remained quite impassive.
“Oh, are you?” answered the latter. “You have discovered that, have you?”
“Discovered?”
The “ghost” seemed a shade nonplussed by this.
“Yes. I’ve been wondering, all the way from Ashford, whether you had yet discovered your unreality, or how soon you would.”
“My dear chap!”
“For you see, as it happens, it was I who created you; I imagined you; you only exist in my imagination. And if I should stop imagining you—as I do now—you would simply cease to exist.”
The ghost disappeared at once; and the man with the map turned, smiling, to the other passenger, who had already sprung to his feet and was pulling the communication cord to stop the train.
“You, at any rate,” he said, “will now believe in ghosts!”
This individual, badly frightened, did not look at his queer companion, did not answer, but, hurriedly opening the door, as the train came to a stop, jumped down to the flint road-bed. He saw the guard running toward him with a rolled green flag in his hand.
“Look here!” he said. “I can’t ride in a compartment with ghosts!”
“Ghosts?” said the guard, peering into the compartment. His peer was a mere matter of form—the compartment was quite empty.
“Well, I’m damned!… There were two men there—and they’re both gone. They both must have been ghosts.”
He stared incredulously into the vacant compartment. The guard laughed scornfully.
“Why, that’s a mere trifle,” he said. “The whole thing is a ghost. The train, the passengers, the driver and myself—even the rails.”
So saying, he waved his rolled green flag, and the whole thing vanished. The solitary passenger found himself alone in a rolling green meadow. There was no train—there was no track. Four sheep lay under an oak tree. The sun was shining—the thrushes were singing—everything was marvelously peaceful. And he was totally and appallingly alone. If only he himself could disappear, he thought, the ending would be perfect! And, as he thought it, he vanished.…
And so, only the bowl of water was left.
Himself in retreat, in full retreat, in disorderly retreat, from a world of memories altogether too painful.
STRANGE MOONLIGHT
I.
It had been a tremendous week—colossal. Its reverberations around him hardly yet slept—his slightest motion or thought made a vast symphony of them, like a breeze in a forest of bells. In the first place, he had filched a volume of Poe’s tales from his mother’s bookcase, and had had in consequence a delirious night in inferno. Down, down he had gone with heavy clangs about him, coiling spouts of fire licking dryly at an iron sky, and a strange companion, of protean shape and size, walking and talking beside him. For the most part, this companion seemed to be nothing but a voice and a wing—an enormous jagged black wing, soft and drooping like a bat’s; he had noticed veins in it. As for the voice, it had been singularly gentle. If it was mysterious, that was no doubt because he himself was stupid. Certainly it had sounded placid and reasonable, exactly, in fact, like his father’s explaining a problem in mathematics; but, though he had noticed the orderly and logical structure, and felt the inevitable approach toward a vast and beautiful or terrible conclusion, the nature and meaning of the conclusion itself always escaped him. It was as if, always, he had come just too late. When, for example, he had come at last to the black wall that inclosed the infernal city, and seen the arched gate, the voice had certainly said that if he hurried he would see, through the arch, a far, low landscape of extraordinary wonder. He had hurried, but it had been in vain. He had reached the gate, and for the tiniest fraction of an instant he had even glimpsed the wide green of fields and trees, a winding blue ribbon of water, and a gleam of intense light touching to brilliance some far object. But then, before he had time to notice more than that every detail in this fairy landscape seemed to lead toward a single shining solution, a dazzling significance, suddenly the infernal rain, streaked fire and rolling smoke, had swept it away. Then the voice had seemed to become ironic. He had failed, and he felt like crying.