style="font-size:15px;"> “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 certain[14]. 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 tools[15]. 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 do[16] 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 Precedency[17], the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints[18], 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
for certain – наверняка
book-binding tools – инструменты для переплёта книг
he will do – он сгодится
Whitaker’s Table of Precedency – ежегодные справочники общей информации, иерархические таблицы
Landseer prints – гравюры Ландсира
