“What the hell?” he shouted. I slipped back to my office, waited a few minutes, then went to see him.
A slender ray came through the broken window and struck the clock on the opposite wall. Grobe sat transfixed, staring at it with more surprise than ever. And no wonder, for the clock had become a parrot.
“Relax, Oddpork,” I said. “It’s only some funny kind of hologram in the clock face, worked by a laser from the lawn. You look like a comic villain, sitting there with that cigar stub in your face.”
The cigar stub moved. Looking closer, I saw it was made up of the packed tails of a few cockroaches, trying to force themselves between his closed lips. More ran up from his spotless collar and joined them, and others made for his nostrils. One approached the queue at the mouth, found another stuck there, and had a nibble at its kicking hind leg.
“Get away! Get away!” I gave Grobe a shake to dislodge them, and his mouth fell open. A brown flood of kicking bodies tumbled out and down, over his well-cut lapels.
I had stopped shuddering by the time I joined the others on the bluff. Pawlie and Blenheim were missing. Edna stopped scanning the horizon with her brass telescope long enough to introduce me to the pretty twins, Alice and Celia. They sat in the grass beside a tangled heap of revolvers, polishing their patent-leather tap shoes.
The ubiquitous Rastus was wiping off his burnt cork makeup. I asked him why.
“Don’t need it anymore. Last night it was my camouflage. I was out in the woods, cutting a path through the electric fence. Quite a wide path, as you’ll understand.”
He continued removing the black until I recognized the late George Hoad.
“George! But you cut your throat, remember? Mopping up blood—”
“Hank, that was your blood. It was you cut your throat in the Gents, after Pawlie vanished. Remember?”
I did, giddily. “What happened to you, then?”
“Your suicide attempt helped me make up my mind; I quit the Institute next day. You were still in the hospital.”
Still giddy, I turned to watch Joe Feeney operating the curious laser I’d seen in the library. Making parrots out of clocks.
“I understand now,” I said. “But what’s the watermelon for?”
“Cheap cooling device.”
“And the ‘flag’ ?” I indicated the shawl-stick arrangement.
“To rally round. I stuck it in the melon because they were using the umbrella stand for—”
“Look!” Edna cried. “The attack begins!” She handed me a second telescope.
All I saw below was the lone figure of Blenheim in his diving suit, shuffling slowly up from the river mist to face seven guards and two pumas. He seemed to be juggling croquet balls.
“Why don’t we help him?” I shouted. “Don’t just sit here shining shoes and idling.”
The twins giggled. “We’ve already helped some,” said Alice, nodding at the pile of weapons. “We made friends with the guards.”
I got the point when those below pulled their guns on Blenheim. As each man drew, he looked at his gun and then threw it away.
“What a waste,” Celia sighed. “Those guns are made from just about the best chocolate you can get.”
Blenheim played his parlour trick on the nearest guard: one juggled ball flew high, the guard looked up, and a second ball clipped him on the upturned chin.
Now the puma guards went into action.
“I can’t look,” I said, my eye glued to the telescope. One of the animals stopped to sniff at a sticky revolver, but the other headed straight for his quarry. He leapt up, trying to fasten his claws into the stranger’s big brass head.
Out of the river mist came a terrible cry, and then a terrible sight: a hobbling grey hulk that resolved into a charging elephant. Charging diagonally, so it looked even larger.
The pumas left the scene. One fled in our direction until Alice snatched up a pistol and fired it in the air. At that sound, the guards decided to look for jobs elsewhere. After all, as Pawlie said later, you couldn’t expect a man to face a juggling diver and a mad elephant with a wooden leg, with nothing but a chocolate .38, not on those wages.
Pawlie was riding on the neck of the elephant. When he came to a wobbling stop I saw that one of Jumbo’s forelegs was a section of tree with the bark still on it. And in the bark, a heart with PS+HL, carved years before.
I felt the triumph was all over—especially since Pawlie kept nodding her head yes at me—until George said:
“Come on, gang. Let’s set it up.”
Jumbo had been pulling a wooden sledge, bearing the Paris kiosk. Now he went off to break his fast on water and grass, while the rest of us set the thing upright. Even before we had fuelled it with whatever was in the fertilizer bags, I guessed that it was a rocket.
After some adjustments, the little door was let down, and a sweet, breakfast pancake odour came forth. Joe Feeney opened a flask of dark liquid and poured it in the entrance. The smell grew stronger.
“Maple sap,” he explained. “From Jumbo’s wooden leg. Mixed with honey. And there’s oatmeal inside. A farewell breakfast.”
I looked in the little door and saw the inside of the ship was made like a metal honeycomb, plenty of climbing room for our masters.
Pawlie came from the building with a few cockroaches in a jar, and let them taste our wares. Then, all at once, it was a sale opening at any big department store. We all stood back and let the great brown wave surge forward and break over the little rocket. Some of them, nymphs especially, scurried all the way up to the nose cone and back down again in their excitement. It all looked so jolly that I tried not to think about their previous meals.
Edna glanced at her watch. “Ten minutes more,” she said. “Or they’ll hit the sun.”
I objected that we’d never get all of them loaded in ten minutes.
“No,” said Pawlie, “but we’ll get the best and strongest. The shrews can keep the rest in control.”
Edna closed the door, and the twins did a vigorous tap-dance on the unfortunate stragglers. A few minutes later, a million members of the finest organization on earth were on their way to the stars.
“To join their little friends,” said Edna.
Pawlie and I touched hands, as Blenheim opened his faceplate.
“I’ve been making this study,” he said, “of spontaneous combustion in giraffes . . .”
The Wardrobe
THOMAS MANN
It was cloudy, cool, and half-dark when the Berlin-Rome express drew in at a middle-sized station on its way. Albrecht van der Qualen, solitary traveller in a first-class compartment with lace covers over the plush upholstery, roused himself and sat up. He felt a flat taste in his mouth, and in his body the none-too-agreeable sensations produced when the train comes to a stop after a long journey and we are aware of the cessation of rhythmic motion and conscious of calls and signals from without. It is like coming to oneself out of drunkenness or lethargy. Our nerves, suddenly deprived of the supporting rhythm, feel bewildered and forlorn. And this the more if we have just roused out of the heavy sleep one falls into in a train.
Albrecht van der Qualen stretched a little, moved to the window, and let down the pane. He looked along the train. Men were busy at the mail van, unloading and loading parcels. The engine gave out a series of sounds, it snorted and rumbled a bit, standing still, but only as a horse stands still, lifting its hoof, twitching its ears, and awaiting impatiently the signal to go on. A tall, stout woman in a long raincoat, with a face expressive of nothing but worry, was dragging a hundred-pound suitcase along the train, propelling it before her with pushes from one knee. She was saying nothing, but looking heated and distressed. Her upper lip stuck out, with little beads of sweat upon it—altogether she was a pathetic figure. “You poor dear thing,” van der Qualen thought. “If I could help you, soothe you, take you in—only for the sake of that upper lip. But each for himself, so things are arranged in life; and I stand here at this moment perfectly
carefree, looking at you as I might at a beetle that has fallen on its back.”
It was half-dark in the station shed. Dawn or twilight—he did not know. He had slept, who could say whether for two, five, or twelve hours? He had sometimes slept for twenty-four, or even more, unbrokenly, an extraordinarily profound sleep. He wore a half-length dark-brown winter overcoat with a velvet collar. From his features it was hard to judge his age: one might actually hesitate between twenty-five and the end of the thirties. He had a yellowish skin, but his eyes were black like live coals and had deep shadows round them. These eyes boded nothing good. Several doctors, speaking frankly as man to man, had not given him many more months.—His dark hair was smoothly parted on one side.
In Berlin—although Berlin had not been the beginning of his journey—he had climbed into the train just as it was moving off—incidentally with his red leather handbag. He had gone to sleep and now at waking felt himself so completely absolved from time that a sense of refreshment streamed through him. He rejoiced in the knowledge that at the end of the thin gold chain he wore round his neck there was only a little medallion in his waistcoat pocket. He did not like to be aware of the hour or the day of the week, and moreover he had no truck with the calendars. Some time ago he had lost the habit of knowing the day of the month or even the month of the year. Everything must be in the air—so he put it in his mind, and the phrase was comprehensive though rather vague. He was seldom or never disturbed in this programme, as he took pains to keep all upsetting knowledge at a distance from him. After all, was it not enough for him to know more or less what season it was? “It is more or less autumn,” he thought, gazing out into the damp and gloomy train shed. “More I do not know. Do I even know where I am?”
His satisfaction at this thought amounted to a thrill of pleasure. No, he did not know where he was! Was he still in Germany? Beyond a doubt. In North Germany? That remained to be seen. While his eyes were still heavy with sleep the window of his compartment had glided past an illuminated sign; it probably had the name of the station on it, but not the picture of a single letter had been transmitted to his brain. In still dazed condition he had heard the conductor call the name two or three times, but not a syllable had he grasped. But out there in a twilight of which he knew not so much as whether it was morning or evening lay a strange place, an unknown town.—Albrecht van der Qualen took his felt hat out of the rack, seized his red leather hand-bag, the strap of which secured a red and white silk and wool plaid into which was rolled an umbrella with a silver crook—and although his ticket was labelled Florence, he left the compartment and the train, walked along the shed, deposited his luggage at the cloakroom, lighted a cigar, thrust his hands—he carried neither stick nor umbrella—into his overcoat pockets, and left the station.
Outside in the damp, gloomy, and nearly empty square five or six hackney coachmen were snapping their whips, and a man with braided cap and long cloak in which he huddled shivering inquired politely: “Hotel zum braven Mann?” Van der Qualen thanked him politely and held on his way. The people whom he met had their coat-collars turned up; he put his up too, nestled his chin into the velvet, smoked, and went his way, not slowly and not too fast.
He passed along a low wall and an old gate with two massive towers; he crossed a bridge with statues on the railings and saw the water rolling slow and turbid below. A long wooden boat, ancient and crumbling, came by, sculled by a man with a long pole in the stern. Van der Qualen stood for a while leaning over the rail of the bridge. “Here,” he said to himself, “is. a river; here is the river. It is nice to think that I call it that because I do not know its name.”—Then he went on.
He walked straight on for a little, on the pavement of a street which was neither very narrow nor very broad; then he turned off to the left. It was evening. The electric arc-lights came on, flickered, glowed, sputtered, and then illuminated the gloom. The shops were closing. “So we may say that it is in every respect autumn,” thought van der Qualen, proceeding along the wet black pavement. He wore no galoshes, but his boots were very thick-soled, durable, and firm, and withal not lacking in elegance.
He held to the left. Men moved past him, they hurried on their business or coming from it. “And I move with them,” he thought, “and am as alone and as strange as probably no man has ever been before. I have no business and no goal. I have not even a stick to lean upon. More remote, freer, more detached, no one can be, I owe nothing to anybody, nobody owes anything to me. God has never held out His hand over me, He knows me not at all. Honest unhappiness without charity is a good thing; a man can say to himself: I owe God nothing.”
He soon came to the edge of the town. Probably he had slanted across it at about the middle. He found himself on a broad suburban street with trees and villas, turned to his right, passed three or four cross-streets almost like village lanes, lighted only by lanterns, and came to a stop in a somewhat wider one before a wooden door next to a commonplace house painted a dingy yellow, which had nevertheless the striking feature of very convex and quite opaque plate-glass windows. But on the door was a sign: “In this house on the third floor there are rooms to let.”
“Ah!” he remarked; tossed away the end of his cigar, passed through the door along a boarding which formed the dividing line between two properties, and then turned left through the door of the house itself. A shabby grey runner ran across the entry. He covered it in two steps and began to mount the simple wooden stair.
The doors to the several apartments were very modest too; they had white glass panes with woven wire over them and on some of them were name-plates. The landings were lighted by oil lamps. On the third storey, the top one, for the attic came next, were entrances right and left, simple brown doors without name-plates. Van der Qualen pulled the brass bell in the middle. It rang, but there was no sign from within. He knocked left. No answer. He knocked right. He heard light steps within, very long, like strides, and the door opened.
A woman stood there, a lady, tall, lean, and old. She wore a cap with a large pale-lilac bow and an old-fashioned, faded black gown. She had a sunken birdlike face and on her brow there was an eruption, a sort of fungus growth. It was rather repulsive.
“Good evening,” said van der Qualen. “The rooms?”
The old lady nodded; she nodded and smiled slowly, without a word, understanding, and with her beautiful long white hand made a slow, languid, and elegant gesture towards the next, the left-hand door. Then she retired and appeared again with a key. “Look,” he thought, standing behind her as she unlocked the door; “you are like some kind of banshee, a figure out of Hoffmann, madam.” She took the oil lamp from its hook and ushered him in.
It was a small, low-ceiled room with a brown floor. Its walls were covered with straw-coloured matting. There was a window at the back in the right-hand wall, shrouded in long, thin white muslin folds. A white door also on the right led into the next room. This room was pathetically bare, with staring white walls, against which three straw chairs, painted pink, stood out like strawberries from whipped cream. A wardrobe, a washing-stand with a mirror.
. . . The bed, a mammoth mahogany piece, stood free in the middle of the room.
“Have you any objections?” asked the old woman, and passed her lovely long, white hand lightly over the fungus growth on her forehead.—It was as though she had said that by accident because she could not think for the moment of a more ordinary phrase. For she added at once: “—so to speak?”
“No, I have no objections,” said van der Qualen. “The rooms are rather cleverly furnished. I will take them. I’d like to have somebody fetch my luggage from the station, here is the ticket. You will be kind enough to make up the bed and give me some water. I’ll take the house key now, and the key to the apartment . . . I’d like a couple of towels. I’ll wash up and go into the city for supper and come back later.”
He drew a nickel case out of his pocket, took out some soap, and began to wash his face and hands, looking as he did s
o through the convex window-panes far down over the muddy, gas-lit suburban streets, over the arc-lights and the villas.—As he dried his hands he went over to the wardrobe. It was a square one, varnished brown, rather shaky, with a simple curved top. It stood in the centre of the right-hand wall exactly in the niche of a second white door, which of course led into the rooms to which the main and middle door on the landing gave access. “Here is something in the world that is well arranged,” thought van der Qualen. “This wardrobe, fits into the door niche as though it were made for it.” He opened the wardrobe door. It was entirely empty, with several rows of hooks in the ceiling; but it proved to have no back, being closed behind by a piece of rough, common grey burlap, fastened by nails or tacks at the four corners.
Van der Qualen closed the wardrobe door, took his hat, turned up the collar of his coat once more, put out the candle, and set forth. As he went through the front room he thought to hear mingled with the sound of his own steps a sort of ringing in the other room: a soft, clear, metallic sound—but perhaps he was mistaken. As though a gold ring were to fall into a silver basin, he thought, as he locked the outer door. He went down the steps and out of the gate and took the way to the town.
In a busy street he entered a lighted restaurant and sat down at one of the front tables, turning his back to all the world. He ate a soupe aux fines herbes with croutons, a steak with a poached egg, a compote and wine, a small piece of green gorgonzola and half a pear. While he paid and put on his coat he took a few puffs from a Russian cigarette, then lighted a cigar and went out. He strolled for a while, found his homeward route into the suburb, and went leisurely back.
The house with the plate-glass windows lay quite dark and silent when van der Qualen opened the house door and mounted the dim stair. He lighted himself with matches as he went, and opened the left-hand brown door in the third storey. He laid hat and overcoat on the divan, lighted the lamp on the big writing-table, and found there his hand-bag as well as the plaid and umbrella. He unrolled the plaid and got a bottle of cognac, then a little glass and took a sip now and then as he sat in the armchair finishing his cigar. “How fortunate, after all,” thought he, “that there is cognac in the world.” Then he went into the bedroom, where he lighted the candle on the night-table, put out the light in the other room, and began to undress. Piece by piece he put down his good, unobtrusive grey suit on the red chair beside the bed; but then as he loosened his braces he remembered his hat and overcoat, which still lay on the couch. He fetched them into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe . . . He took a step backwards and reached behind him to clutch one of the large dark-red mahogany balls which ornamented the bedposts. The room, with its four white walls, from which the three pink chairs stood out like strawberries from whipped cream, lay in the unstable light of the candle. But the wardrobe over there was open and it was not empty. Somebody was standing in it, a creature so lovely that Albrecht van der Qualen’s heart stood still a moment and then in long, deep, quiet throbs resumed its beating. She was quite nude and one of her slender arms reached up to crook a forefinger round one of the hooks in the ceiling of the wardrobe. Long waves of brown hair rested on the childlike shoulders—they breathed that charm to which the only answer is a sob. The candlelight was mirrored in her narrow black eyes. Her mouth was a little large, but it had an expression as sweet as the lips of sleep when after long days of pain they kiss our brow. Her ankles nestled and her slender limbs clung to one another.
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