I can say very little more about this, my first sensation. Many people have stood directly underneath a New York sky-scraper and been terrified, on looking up, by their own smallness in relation to the cliff above them. Well, try to conceive the mental sky-scraper which towered above me at that moment, upon whose vast side my little body was stuck, and think how giddy I was. This, however, was something quite mild in comparison with the experience which immediately followed. In conjunction with my loss of all sense of normal size, there came a loss of all sense of gravity or direction, such as I pray I may never know again.
Columbus, you will remember, was discouraged from going to the other side of a world which he believed to be a round world, on the argument of the sheer absurdity of such a proposition. If the world was round, it was said, then, on the other side, the trees and flowers were growing upside down, human beings were standing, or walking about, on their heads, houses were built downwards, clouds were floating about beneath them, and when it rained it would have to rain upwards against the roofs. Nor has this argument ever been gainsaid. If anyone in England is going to presume that he is, as he feels he knows he is, the ‘right way up,’ then he has, at the same time, to admit that, at the moment of his making that mental assumption, the people in Australia must be the ‘wrong way up,’ standing on their heads. The same thing applies to anyone in Australia, making the same mental assumption in regard to the English. What is noticeable is that members of neither side will admit to standing on their heads, and English people and Australians are subconsciously calling each other liars with every breath they take and every act they perform. The double fiction, or the double truth, serves us well, however, and keeps us all sane. But imagine the plight of someone who momentarily loses his faculty for belief in the requisite fiction, who can only visualize the reverse fiction, who can only see himself hanging and looking downwards into the infinite abyss of space, his feet somehow stuck, like a fly’s, to the vast stretch and weight of an earth now sweeping away in all directions and in all its multiformity above him!
That is what I now felt. I sprang to my feet. The blood came surging into my head. Gravity, I felt, could no longer hold me. In another moment I would go plunging off into the blue abyss beneath me. I was not on top of the earth, the whole earth was on top of me!
I could see, just above me, and near to me, Anne, asleep in the sun and herself stuck by some accountable attraction to the sand from which she, too, must in the next second fly off with me into space!
I called to her, I wanted to cling to her, to save myself from going. She took no notice—she, and the whole earth, were on top of me and against me! My heart was thumping, my ear were singing. I flung out my arms and screamed. I saw her eyes open; I saw her stare down at me in terror, and bewilderedly reach her arms down towards me: I tried to reach up to her, but could not do so and screamed again. I found myself struggling in her arms, and everything went dark. Merciful universe, in which all, at last, goes dark! When I came round, a few minutes later, the sky was above me again, and I was lying on, not under, a familiar looking world, in a state of confusion as to what exactly had happened.
It is easy enough to see how this looked to Anne, who had been lying beside me. I must have seemed suddenly to have sprung from my sleep in the sun, to have made awful epileptic movements above her, and then fallen upon her in a swoon—the whole performance resembling a seizure, or heart attack, or nightmare of some sort. When she questioned me about it, indeed, I said that I had had a nightmare, and left it at that, as I could never have explained the truth to her, and I was terrified of dwelling on the subject lest that awful angle of vision might return.
There can be no doubt that these subjective sensations were produced objectively by Crowmarsh’s fiddling with the Asteradio—by the fact that he was somehow tentatively ‘pulling’ at me, dragging me away from the planet Moribundia experimentally or in preparation for my ultimate return. The reader will now have some intimation, I hope, of what it feels like, to be hauled off one world in the direction of another! The knobs having been adjusted, in merciless disregard for any feelings I might have, the concert went on.
This first one was the worst attack of its kind which I was made to endure, but by no means the last. Thereafter it seemed that Crowmarsh had a fit of asteradial ‘nerves,’ and almost daily I was made conscious of the fact by sensations similar to those described above. They might come upon me anywhere and at any time—on the sands, at the hotel, in the streets, during a meal, while taking a bath. I was now pretty sure what was happening, however, and my terror was somewhat modified both by this knowledge and by the similarity, and at last familiarity, of the sensations themselves. Indeed, I believe a time might have come when I could have faced and endured the feeling of hanging upside down in eternity almost with no other emotion than one of curiosity—of relish even, of its excessive novelty!
But, of course, it was only after much suffering that I felt the approach of any such feeling of immunity, and I cannot exaggerate the miserable state of incessant apprehensiveness and fright I was in at this period.
Above all, there was the awful thought, which I tried to fight down, that ‘something had gone wrong’ up there (I thought of our world now as ‘up there’) and that I should never get back. Certain travellers on the sea complain of a subdued feeling of uncertainty and fright when half-way out on a long voyage. Imagine the feelings of one who is half-way out on a journey through the sea of space and senses the fact that the engines are behaving in a dubious and hesitant manner! And, instead of ‘seasickness,’ think of those height-sensations of mine as a form of ‘world-sickness,’ the sickening sense of the motion of the waves being replaced by the sickening sense of the motion of planets!
I should have said that these attacks did not begin to take place until I had been about two weeks at Seabrightstone. Among other things, they had the effect of reminding me in a forcible manner that the period allotted to my stay in Moribundia was by no means limitless. ‘About three months,’ Crowmarsh had said, and I now awoke to the fact that two of those months would very soon have gone. At the same time I realized that there was a tremendous amount more to be seen and done if I was to bring back anything resembling a complete account or summary of this strange world, and I began to chafe to get back to Nwotsemaht.
However, I was persuaded by Anne to stay on another ten days, and I filled in the time by consuming an enormous amount of Moribundian literature, about which I will have something to say later. Then the day came when we took a train back.
Anne returned to her house in town with her father, and I went back to the ‘Moribundian.’
Here I was given the warmest and most flattering reception by the clerk, upon whose countenance there remained not a trace of that haggard illness and worry for which I had learned to look. Instead he was smiling broadly, bustling about like mad, and showing wonderful efficiency. In spite of a heavy rush of business he not only remembered my name, he remembered the number of my old room and each of my personal requirements, and was the soul of bright and brimming courtesy.
As I left the desk I happened to see the manager come out to have a word, or rather balloon, with him. This is what it was:
To which the clerk gratefully and modestly threw back on the air:
adroitly head-ballooning at the same time:
The day after this the clerk disappeared from the desk, and I never saw him again.
Presumably he had gone on to better things.
It was good to be back in the capital again, and in the next few days I found my spirits reviving a little. We had a little rain, and cold, and fog, all of which put new life into me, though it set the Moribundians coughing and sneezing, and rushing to their remedies—and, with my return from Seabrightstone, Crowmarsh made no further onslaughts upon my position in space. You could have imagined that he had somehow sensed and disapproved of my idling down there by the seaside!
But in the remainder of my stay in Moribun
dia I was not fated ever to know again my first contentment. My next trouble and problem broke out from the least expected quarter—from Anne herself, in fact.
CHAPTER XIII
I do not know exactly when I first began to notice it, but it was not long after our return to town that the suspicion broke upon my mind that Anne was avoiding me.
I cannot pretend that I had been remarkably lover-like during the latter part of our stay—indeed, I had felt that a little rest from each other would do neither of us any harm; and though we had met for dinner one night I had not made any special effort to see her during the first few days after we got back.
She began, I think, by being evasive over the ’phone, either leaving it to her maid to answer, or, when it was impossible to do this, pleading other engagements or business when I suggested a meeting. I took little notice of this at first, but at last it became so obvious that, still pretending that nothing was the matter, I began to set little telephonic traps for her, and positively forced her—if she was to save her face—to make an appointment with me. Under this kind of pressure, she did arrange to meet me, though only for half an hour for a drink, and though I could see she was trying hard to behave with me as usual, it was equally clear that something was wrong.
Not wishing to appear too anxious, I still ignored this strange behaviour on her part, and got her to agree to meet me the next day. Her maid telephoned to break this appointment, and in the next three days I was unable to establish any contact with her at all.
I decided that she must have grown tired of me, and in a fit of pique reminded myself that ‘there were plenty of other fish in the sea.’ Moribundia, as I have made clear, was brimming over with beautiful girls, plenty of whom were staying at the hotel, and I now had quite enough confidence in myself to open an acquaintanceship with any one of them.
I actually did make the acquaintance of several such girls. I noticed, though, that after my first few conversations or meetings with them, they all began to behave in very much the same way as Anne was behaving, that is to say, avoiding me politely, but like the plague.
Before long I was altogether disquieted, and ’phoned up Anne again in desperation. As I had anticipated, I was not allowed to speak to her, but I was not going to let this stand in my way. Going out and buying a large box of ‘Siljoy’ stockings (in whose efficacy for such a situation as this I had every reason to believe), I walked round to the street in which she lived and waited in the region of her house until she came out.
She came out in due course, and I must say looked extremely startled and guilty when I stepped up to her. For a moment I thought she was going to be angry, but when her eye fell upon the box of stockings under my arm, a strange, sad, half-longing, half-pitying look came into her eyes. I could see that she was undergoing some extraordinary inner conflict—that she was being torn between two feelings.
At any rate she consented to walk along with me, and I at once plied her with questions.
“Why are you avoiding me, Anne?” I asked. ‘What has come over you? What is the matter with me?”
At this she murmured something I could not hear, and she refused to meet my eyes.
“But you must tell me,” I said. “Surely you will let me know what is the matter with me. I am alone in this world—I have told you all about myself—I always thought you were my best friend here. What is wrong? Are you not my best friend?”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s just it.”
“What do you mean? If you are my best friend, surely you can tell me what is the matter?”
“You don’t understand …” she said.
“Then it comes to this,” I said. “Even my best friend won’t tell me? Is that it?”30
“Yes,” she said, looking at me in an extraordinary way. “That’s exactly it.”
I was so angry at this that I thrust the box of ‘Siljoy’ stockings into her hands, and, with a curt ‘Good-bye, then’, walked away.
My rage lasted some time, but its exhilaration passed away only too soon and left me with a feeling of despondency and loneliness which grew worse and worse as the day declined and the evening drew on, and became at last unbearable.
I tried to enter into conversation with several odd people, or even groups of people, at the hotel, but it seemed in each case that after a few minutes they made some excuse to go away and leave me alone.
Finally I became so wretched that I foolishly decided to take the only form of escape now open to me, that is, to get drunk.
Before doing this, however, I took the precaution of first of all going upstairs and changing into evening clothes. I was instinctively aware that no one, no male at any rate (and women, apart from charwomen, never get drunk in Moribundia), was ever seen in this condition on the streets save in evening clothes and top hat,31 and, already suspecting that I must have unconsciously sinned against some obscure Moribundian canon, I was not going consciously and openly to defy any convention.
I certainly got drunk that night, but I should here explain that Moribundian alcohol has an effect upon the brain and nervous system quite different from anything we know on earth.
After only a few drinks, for instance, I found my speech suffering from the most unnatural impediment or addition, which took the form of my being compelled to interpolate, after every three or four words, a word which I at once realized was either the Latin word for ‘this’, or the American word for country bumpkin—that is to say ‘hic’, or ‘hick.’ This continued throughout the entire evening, and, in addition to betraying my condition to every observer, must have sounded ineffably absurd.
In addition to this I found myself converting almost every available consonant into the ‘sh’ sound.
Thus, when after several drinks in the hotel bar, I was asking the hotel porter the way out into the street, instead of simply saying: ‘I say, porter, is this the way out into the street?’ I found myself addressing him thus:
“I shay—hic—portersh—hic—ish thish—hic—the waysh out—hic—intosh shtreet—hic?”
But such disorders of the speech are merely the preliminary effects which the Moribundian alcohol has upon the system. Very soon afterwards I found that my nose was going a deep beetroot red colour: I had completely lost my balance on my feet, my tie was undone, my top hat was battered, and I was making the most fantastic errors of judgment and vision. For instance, I was constantly under the impression that I saw two, or even three, people, when only one was standing before me! Thus, in speaking to anyone, I was always making reference to ‘both of you’ or ‘your twin brother’ or ‘the middle one,’ and causing the greatest amusement to those who watched me.
Towards the close of the evening I met several other people who were in the same state, and with whom, from time to time, I formed a sort of bewildered alliance. It is the instinct of the Moribundian drunk man to seek a companion in a similar condition, upon whose arm he may hang, and to whom he may make his fatuous observations without rebuff; and, of course, one drunk man can recognize another instantly by his evening dress and general appearance. At one time, indeed, as many as five of us joined together, and, arm-in-arm, sang in chorus an old sentimental Moribundian song called Teews Enileda32—this with great feeling, but, of course, hopelessly out of tune.
All these other drunk people were behaving in just the same way as myself and making the same absurd mistakes—that is to say, imagining that animal hearth-rugs were genuine jungle beasts, that statues of women were alive and admonishing or inviting them, that area-railings were the bars of a prison, that they were engaged in long-distance swimming when they had in reality only fallen into horses’ drinking troughs, etc., etc. Under the circumstances, and with all these delusions, snares and pitfalls, the simple business of getting home assumed the proportions of a Homeric journey, and I do not know how any of us would have got back had there not been a lot of policemen about—‘Conshtabalsh’ as we called them—who in collaboration with a great number of milkmen pointed out our m
istakes to us, let us drape ourselves around them, and generally took care of us.
Needless to say, I had the most indescribably awful ‘head’ the next morning, which I tried to cure in the traditional Moribundian manner, that is, by tying, or trying to tie, an enormous piece of ice on to the top of my head. But I felt so absolutely beastly while this was on, and my neck and clothes got so wet, that I soon abandoned it, reckoning that the remedy was worse than the ailment.
My depression that morning knew no bounds. Not only was I feeling sick, not only was everybody shunning me, not only was I thoroughly ashamed of myself for having made such a fool of myself the night before: another problem had arisen from the fact that the usual amount of money which appeared in my pocket daily from nowhere—twenty-five pounds—had suddenly been reduced to the meagre sum of five pounds only. I had noticed that this had been happening for two or three days previously, and I had imagined that some mistake had been made and the matter would right itself: it now became apparent that hence forward this was to be my income.
To this day I do not quite understand the cause of this sudden drop. I can only surmise that as in Moribundia the amount of a man’s income was in direct proportion to his merit some loss of merit on my part was being reflected in this way. Perhaps it was the immorality of having taken Anne away to the seaside; perhaps it was my extreme laziness while I was there; perhaps it was this social crime which I seemed to have committed, which caused people to shun me, but about which they would tell me nothing. Whatever the cause, there it was, and I realized with the acutest displeasure that at this rate I should not be able to go on staying at the ‘Moribundian.’ I had been ordering everything I wanted, and I owed them a large bill already.
Impromptu in Moribundia Page 13