Kitabı oku: «Дом с привидениями. Уровень 2 / A Haunted House», sayfa 2

“I’ll wait by my bag, ma’am. That’s safe. He will meet me. Oh, there he is! That’s my son.”

So they walk off together.

Well, but I’m confounded. Surely, Minnie, you know better! A strange young man. Stop! I’ll tell him—Minnie! Miss Marsh! I don’t know though. There’s something queer in her cloak as it blows. Oh, but it’s untrue, it’s indecent. . Look how he bends as they reach the gateway. She finds her ticket. What’s the joke? Off they go¹⁰, down the road, side by side. Well, my world is ruined. What do I stand on? What do I know? That’s not Minnie. There never was Moggridge. Who am I? Life is bare.

The last look of them. He is stepping from the kerb and she is following him. Mysterious figures! Mother and son. Who are you? Why do you walk down the street? Where will you sleep tonight? Where will you sleep tomorrow? Oh, how it whirls and surges! I start after them. People drive this way and that. The white light splutters and pours. Plate-glass windows. Carnations; chrysanthemums. Ivy in dark gardens. Milk carts at the door. Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you. Mothers and sons; you, you, you. I hasten. I follow. This must be the sea. The landscape is grey; dim as ashes. The water murmurs and moves. I fall on my knees. I go through the ritual. I adore you, unknown figures. I open my arms. I embrace you. I’ll draw you to me—adorable world!

The String Quartet

Well, here we are. Cast your eye over the room. You will see that Tubes¹¹ and trams and omnibuses, private carriages, landaus with bays in them, are weaving threads from one end of London to the other. Yet I begin to doubt…

If indeed it’s true, as they say, that Regent Street is closed, and the weather not cold for the time of year… If I forgot to write about the leak in the larder… If I left my glove in the train… If the ties of blood require to accept cordially the hand which is offered…

“Seven years since we met!”

“The last time in Venice.”

“And where are you living now?”

“Well, the late afternoon suits me the best¹².”

“But I knew you at once!”

“Still, the war is the war.”

Such little arrows. One is launched. Another presses forward. What chance is there?

Of what? It becomes every minute more difficult to say why, in spite of everything, I sit here. I believe I can’t now say what happened. I can’t now say when it happened.

“Did you see the procession?”

“The King looked cold.”

“No, no, no. But what was it?”

“She bought a house at Malmesbury.”

“How lucky to find one!”

On the contrary, it is sure that she is damned. Whoever she may be. Why fidget? Why so anxious about the cloaks and gloves, whether to button or unbutton? Was it the sound of the second violin the ante-room? Here they come. Four black figures. They are carrying instruments. They seat themselves under the downpour of light. They rest the tips of their bows on the music stand. They lift them with a simultaneous movement. They poise them lightly. The first violin counts one, two, three…

Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet. Drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep. They race under the arches. The fish rushed down by the swift waters. Now the fish swept into an eddy where. It’s difficult. Conglomeration of fish all in a pool. Jolly old fishwives, obscene old women. How deeply they laugh and shake and rollick, when they walk, from side to side, hum, hah!

“That’s an early Mozart, of course.”

“But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair¹³. I mean hope. What do I mean? That’s the worst of music! I want to dance. I want to laugh. I want to eat pink cakes, yellow cakes. I want to drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, now—I can relish that. The older ones like indecency. Hah, hah! I’m laughing. What at? You said nothing. Nor did the old gentleman opposite. But suppose—suppose… Hush!”

The moon comes through the willow boughs. I see your face. I hear your voice. The bird is singing. We pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Together, like reeds in moonlight. Crash!

The boat sinks. The figures ascend. But they taper to a dusky wraith which draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings. It unseals my sorrow. It thaws compassion. It floods with love the sunless world. Soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy.

Why then grieve? Ask what? Remain unsatisfied? Rose leaves are falling. Falling. Ah, but they cease. One rose leaf is falling from an enormous height. It is like a little parachute from an invisible balloon. It won’t reach us.

“No, no. I noticed nothing. That’s the worst of music—these silly dreams. The second violin was late, you say?”

“There’s old Mrs. Munro, she goes out on this slippery floor. Poor woman. Blinder each year”

Eyeless old age, grey-headed Sphinx. There she stands on the pavement. She is beckoning, so sternly, the red omnibus.

“How lovely! How well they play! How-how-how!”

Simplicity itself. The feathers in the hat are bright. They are pleasing as a child’s rattle. Very strange, very exciting.

“How-how-how!” Hush!

These are the lovers on the grass.

“If, madam, you take my hand…”

“Sir, I can trust you with my heart. Moreover, we left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.”

“Then these are the embraces of our souls.”

The lemons nod assent. The swan pushes from the bank. The swan floats into mid stream.

“But to return. He followed me down the corridor. We turned the corner. He trod on the lace of my petticoat. I cried ‘Ah!’ I stopped. He drew his sword. He cried, ‘Mad! Mad! Mad!’ I screamed. The Prince came out in his velvet skull-cap and furred slippers. He snatched a rapier from the wall. The King of Spain’s gift, you know. I escaped. But listen! The horns!”

The gentleman replies fast to the lady. She runs up the scale with witty exchange of compliment. The words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough. Love, laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss. The green garden, the pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky. Tramp and trumpets. Clang and clangour. March of myriads.

But this city to which we travel has neither stone nor marble. It stands unshakable. The pillars are bare. The pillars are auspicious to none. They cast no shade. They are resplendent and severe. I fall back. I eager no more. I desire to go. I desire to find the street. I desire to mark the buildings. I desire to greet the applewoman. I desire to say to the maid who opens the door:

“A starry night.”

“Good night, good night. You go this way?”

“Alas. I go that.”

The Mark on the Wall

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year. I looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire. The steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book. Three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it was the winter time. We finished our tea. I remember that I was smoking a cigarette. I looked up. I saw the mark on the wall. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette. My eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals. That old fancy of the crimson flag on the castle tower came into my mind. I thought of the cavalcade of red knights. The sight of the mark interrupted the fancy. It is an old fancy, an automatic fancy. The mark was a small round mark. It was black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

Our thoughts swarm upon a new object. As ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. Was that mark made by a nail? It must be for a miniature. The miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. Some people had this house before us. They chose an old picture for an old room. They were very interesting people. I think of them so often, in such queer places. I will never see them again. I will never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house. They wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said.

But for that mark, I’m not sure about it. I don’t believe it was made by a nail. It’s too big. It is too round for that. I may get up. But if I get up and look at it, I won’t be able to say for certain¹⁴. No one knows how it happened.

Oh! dear me! The mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have. What an accidental affair is this life?

What an accidental affair is our civilization? Let me take some things. Where are they? Did the cat gnaw them? Did the rat nibble them? Three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools¹⁵. Then there were the bird cages. Then the iron hoops. Then the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle. Then the bagatelle board, the hand organ. All gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds lie about the roots of turnips. The wonder is that I have any clothes on my back. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to the Tube. Fifty miles an hour! At the feet of God entirely naked! Yes, that can express the rapidity of life. Than can express the perpetual waste and repair. All is so casual. All is so haphazard.

But after life. Thick green stalks are pulling down slowly. The cup of the flower turns over. It deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, will one be born there? One is born helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight. One is born at the toes of the Giants. The trees are like men and women. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark. And they are intersected by thick stalks, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues. They will, as time goes on, become more definite. They will become…—I don’t know what.

And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance. Such as a small rose leaf. I am not a very vigilant housekeeper. Look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example. The dust which, so they say, buried Troy. Only fragments of pots utterly refuse annihilation, as one can believe.

The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane. I want to think quietly. I want to think calmly. I want to think spaciously. I want to slip easily from one thing to another. I want to slip without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface. To steady myself, let me catch the first idea.

Shakespeare. Well, he will do¹⁶ as well as another. A man in an arm-chair who looked into the fire, so. A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down. Through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand. People were looking in through the open door. It was a summer’s evening. But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all.

“And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said I saw a flower on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed saw the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?” I asked.

But I don’t remember the answer. Tall flowers with purple tassels. And so on. All the time I create the figure of myself in my own mind. It was lovingly, stealthily. It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry. It is very important.

The looking-glass smashes. The image disappears. The romantic figure with the green of forest depths disappears. We see only that shell of a person. It is an airless, shallow, bald, prominent shell. We face each other in omnibuses and underground railways. We are looking into the mirror. The novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections. Of course there is not one reflection. There is an almost infinite number. They will explore the depths. They will pursue the phantoms. Let us follow the example of the Greeks did and Shakespeare. But these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls articles and cabinet ministers.

Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons. People sat all together in one room until a certain hour,. And nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was like this: they were made of tapestry with little yellow compartments upon them. Like the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking! How wonderful it was to discover that these real things were not entirely real. Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths. They were indeed half phantoms. The damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder? Men perhaps. The masculine point of view governs our lives. It sets the standard. It established Whitaker’s Table of Precedency¹⁷, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints¹⁸, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth. They leave us all with a sense of illegitimate freedom. If freedom exists, of course.

In certain lights that mark on the wall seems volumetric. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it cast a perceptible shadow. I run my finger down that strip of the wall. It will mount and descend. A smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are either tombs or camps. Of the two I prefer the tombs, like most English people. There must be some book about it. Some antiquary dug up those bones. He gave them a name.

What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part¹⁹, I daresay. They examine clods of earth and stone. They get into correspondence with the clergy. The Colonel himself feels philosophic. He accumulates evidence. He finally believes in the camp. Suddenly a stroke kills him. His last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child. His last conscious thoughts are of the camp and that arrow-head there. It is now at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and Nelson’s wineglass.

No, no, nothing is proved. Nothing is known. I get up at this very moment. I ascertain that the mark on the wall is really the head of a gigantic old nail. But what shall I gain? Knowledge?

And what is knowledge? Our learned men are the descendants of witches and hermits. They crouched in caves. They interrogated shrew-mice. They wrote down the language of the stars.

Yes, we can imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers. How peaceful it is down here! How peaceful it is in the centre of the world!

I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is. A nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?

This thought is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality. Who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Lord High Chancellor²⁰ follows the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop of York follows the Lord High Chancellor. Everybody follows somebody. Such is the philosophy of Whitaker. The great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows. Let that comfort you.

I understand Nature’s game. I take action to end any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, our slight contempt for men of action comes. Men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, I want to stop the disagreeable thoughts.

I feel a satisfying sense of reality. It turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite. Here is something real. Thus, one wakes from a midnight dream of horror. One hastily turns on the light. One lies quiescent. One worships the chest of drawers²¹. One worships solidity. One worships reality. One worships the impersonal world. The world is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of²².

Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree. Trees grow. We don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow. They grow in meadows, in forests. They grow by the side of rivers.

The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons. They paint rivers green. I like to think of the fish. I like to think of water-beetles. I like to think of the tree itself. The slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June.

One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth. Then the last storm comes. The high branches drive deep into the ground. Even so, life isn’t done with²³. There are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree. They are all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement. They are in lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea. This tree is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts. I want to take each one separately.

Where was I? What was it? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember anything.

Everything is moving. Everything is falling. Everything is slipping. Everything is vanishing. Someone is standing over me. Someone is saying:

“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”

“Yes?”

“Though why buy newspapers? Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! I don’t see why we have a snail on our wall.”

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.

The New Dress

Mrs. Barnet handed her the mirror. Mabel took her cloak off. She had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong. Thus she confirmed the suspicion. It was not right, not quite right. She went upstairs. She greeted Clarissa Dalloway. She went straight to the far end of the room, to the corner. There a looking-glass hung. She looked. No! It was not right. And at once the misery, the profound dissatisfaction met her, relentlessly. She always tried to hide it.

When she woke at night at home, when she was reading Borrow or Scott; these men, these women were thinking “What’s Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!” Her own cowardice, her mean blood depressed her. And at once the room seemed sordid. It was repulsive. Her own drawing-room seemed shabby. She touched the letters on the hall table. She said: “How dull!” All this now seemed unutterably silly, paltry, and provincial. She came into Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room. All this was absolutely destroyed.

That evening she was sitting over the teacups. Mrs. Dalloway’s invitation came. She decided not to be fashionable. It was absurd to pretend it even. Fashion meant style. Fashion meant thirty guineas at least. Why not be original? Why not be herself, anyhow? And she took her mother’s old fashion book²⁴. It was a Paris fashion book of the time of the Empire.

But she dared not look in the glass. She did not face the whole horror—the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress. This dress was with its long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist. All these things looked so charming in the fashion book, but not on her, not among all these ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy.

“But, my dear, it’s perfectly charming!” Rose Shaw said.

We are all like flies which are trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer. Mabel repeated this phrase. She was trying to find some spell to annul this pain. She was trying to make this agony endurable. Tags of Shakespeare, lines from books suddenly came to her. She was in agony. She repeated them over and over again. “Flies which are trying to crawl,” she repeated. Now she saw flies which were crawling slowly out of a saucer of milk. The other people there are like flies. They are trying to hoist themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, insignificant, toiling flies. She saw them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that. She was a fly. The others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects. They were dancing, fluttering, skimming. She alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.

“I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly,” she said to Robert Haydon.

She wanted to reassure herself. And, of course, Robert Haydon answered something quite polite, quite insincere. And she said to herself (again from some book), “Lies, lies, lies!”

She saw the bottom of Robert Haydon’s heart. She saw through everything. She saw the truth. This was true, this drawing-room, this self, and the other false. Miss Milan’s little workroom was really terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes and cabbage. Miss Milan put the glass in her hand. Then she looked at herself with the dress on. An extraordinary bliss shot through her heart.

She became a beautiful woman. Just for a second, a grey-white, mysterious, charming girl looked at her. It was the core of herself. It was the soul of herself. And she felt, suddenly, honestly, full of love for Miss Milan. She felt much fonder of Miss Milan than of anyone in the whole world.

And then everything vanished. The dress, the room, the love, the pity, the looking-glass, and the canary’s cage—all vanished. Here she was in a corner of Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room.

But it was all so paltry to care so much at her age with two children, to be so dependent on people’s opinions. It was all so paltry not to have principles or convictions. It was all so paltry not to be able to say as other people did, “There’s Shakespeare! There’s death! We’re all weevils in a captain’s biscuit.”

She came into the room. But she looked foolish and self-conscious. She simpered like a schoolgirl. She slouched across the room, like a mongrel.

“Now the fly’s in the saucer,” she said to herself, “right in the middle. It can’t get out. The milk is sticking its wings together.”

“It’s so old-fashioned,” she said to Charles Burt.

He stopped on his way to talk to someone else.

She meant the picture and not her dress, that was old-fashioned. And one word of praise, one word of affection from Charles can change everything. “Mabel, you’re looking charming tonight!”

Charles said nothing of the kind, of course. He was malice itself.

“Mabel’s got a new dress!” he said.

The poor fly was absolutely shoved into the middle of the saucer. Really, he had no heart. He had no kindness, only a veneer of friendliness. Miss Milan was much more real. Miss Milan was much kinder.

“Why,” she asked herself, “can’t I feel one thing always? Why can’t I feel quite sure that Miss Milan is right? Why can’t I feel Charles wrong and stick to it? Why can’t I feel sure about the canary? Why can’t I feel pity and love in a room full of people?”

It was her odious, weak character again. She can’t be seriously interested in conchology, etymology, botany and archeology, like Mary Dennis, like Violet Searle.

Then Mrs. Holman saw her. Of course a thing like a dress was beneath Mrs. Holman’s notice. Not to have value, that was it, she thought. All the time she saw little bits of her yellow dress in the round looking-glass. It was amazing to think how much humiliation and agony and effort and passion were contained in this thing. Ah, this greed was tragic. It was like a row of cormorants. It was tragic!

In her yellow dress tonight she knew that she was condemned. She was despised. It seemed to her that the yellow dress was a penance. She deserved this penance. But it was not her fault, after all. They were ten in the family. They never had enough money. Her mother carried great cans. She was just like her aunts. She wanted to live in India. She wanted to marry to some hero like Sir Henry Lawrence. She wanted to marry some builder in a turban.

She married Hubert, with his job in the Law Courts. They live in a small house. They live without proper maids. She is a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother and a wobbly wife, like all her brothers and sisters. Except perhaps Herbert. That wretched fly—where did she read the story about the fly and the saucer? Yes, she had those moments. But now she is forty. By degrees she will cease to struggle anymore. But that is deplorable!

She will go to the London Library tomorrow. She will find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book. A book by a clergyman, by an American. Or she will walk down the Strand. She will enter a hall. A miner will tell about the life in the pit. Suddenly she will become a new person. She will be absolutely transformed. She will wear a uniform. She will be called Sister Somebody. She will never think about clothes again.

She got up from the blue sofa. The yellow button in the looking-glass got up too. She waved her hand to Charles and Rose. She did not depend on them. The yellow button moved out of the looking-glass. She walked towards Mrs. Dalloway and said,

“Good night.”

“But it’s too early to go,” said Mrs. Dalloway. She was always charming.

“I’m afraid I must,” said Mabel Waring. “But,” she added in her weak, wobbly voice. It sounded ridiculous when she tried to strengthen it, “I enjoyed myself enormously.”

“I enjoyed myself,” she said to Mr. Dalloway. She met him on the stairs.

“Lies, lies, lies!” she said to herself. “Right in the saucer!” she said to herself as she thanked Mrs. Barnet.