Impromptu in Moribundia
Page 19
At any rate, the moment was brief enough. Above the angry roar of those little voices I became aware of a humming, droning, hypnotic noise—something like the noise of an electric vacuum cleaner, something like a dentist’s drill at the peak of its song.
I listened intently to this rhythmic sound, which seemed to be approaching nearer, and was seized by the hideous fancy that it came from some engine of destruction with which they meant to blow me out of my refuge. Then it grew nearer and nearer, and I found myself surrendering to its hypnotic quality, growing almost sleepy.
All at once I realized that the noise was coming, not from outside, but from within the ‘lift’—from within my own ears! I closed my eyes. I opened them and saw, instead of the wild Little Men, a clear and shining image of myself in a mirror, staring in a puzzled way at myself. At the same moment the noise within my ears grew to an intolerable volume, and I understood everything. This was not, never had been, a ‘lift’; I was in the Asteradio and I was on my journey home!
Almost immediately, instead of being grateful for my good fortune, for the miracle which had saved me, I was conscious only of anguish and terror, and felt that I would rather go back and die a thousand deaths at the hands of the Little Men than have to listen again to that awful noise, with that awful Knowledge behind it, which already, from an illimitable distance, I could feel moving in my direction. Not again, not again, not again! That was the thought that went through my tortured and desperate head as I braced myself, straining at the steel bands which bound me, to descend once more into the engine-room of the Universe!
I am glad to say that on that return trip I was spared a renewal of that experience. I was not taken down to the engine-room. I was merely given a friendly reminder of its existence by hearing it from afar. Or if I did go down I was not conscious while I was there. Unconsciousness was granted me at the moment I prayed for it and, except for a vague, dreamy memory I have of waking for about thirty seconds in the stifling heat and glare of the Asteradio (and feeling quite sure that owing to some mistake I had been inside it for about three months, and that I was certainly about to die), I did not regain consciousness until I had been flung back again on this earth.
The circumstances of my reappearance are too much a matter of common knowledge for me to relate in detail. As is known, error entered in, and instead of being taken out of the Asteradio, as was anticipated, like a piece of cake that had been put away in a cupboard, I was first found, hysterically sobbing, at one o’clock in the morning, on the steps of the Constitutional Club in Northumberland Avenue.
The constable who was called to me was unable to get anything from me. Apart from incessantly repeating the words ‘For King and Empire, For King and Empire,’52 I would not talk, and I could not get any clear idea of who I was, where I had been, or what I was doing.
I simply wept floods of tears and repeated the same words. What caused my choice of these words I have no idea. I had at the time, as far as I can remember, a feeling that it was urgently necessary for me to deliver a solemn message or slogan of some sort (presumably from Moribundia) and these were the only words that came into my head. I was removed from the steps of the Constitutional Club to the Police Station. The whole thing was very odd.
At the Police Station I slept for three hours, and awoke with my memory unimpaired, and with a full knowledge of everything exactly as it had happened. I immediately demanded my freedom: but my story was not believed, and I created something of a disturbance. I was finally persuaded to wait until the morning, and the hours of waiting were not pleasant. Finding myself behind bars like this, and seeing the bland incredulity of the police, I was seized by the ugly fancy that perhaps Crowmarsh would disown me, that perhaps, even, there was no Crowmarsh and no Asteradio, that I was to be disowned, outcast, by this world as well as by the Moribundian, that I had no place in either—no place, that is, amongst the stars and the planets at all!
But after various irritating delays my identity was established, and at nine o’clock the next morning Crowmarsh himself did me the honour of coming round in a taxi to fetch me. I believe to this day that he was less worried about my state of health than about the error which had disabled him from taking me out of the Asteradio like a piece of cake out of a cupboard: but I was too glad to see him to be bothered about anything of that sort.
He was polite and charming, and at once took me back in the taxi to Chandos Street. Here, in his room on the ground floor (not upstairs, thank you!), he put me into an armchair and, early as the hour was, offered me a whisky and soda. I accepted the offer, and also had a cigarette. The reader, who will have had enough difficulty in believing much that I have told him, will readily take my word when I say that I have never enjoyed a drink and smoke so well, before or since.
And if a Moribundian balloon could have come out of my head as I sat in that chair, I am not dubious concerning the form it would have taken. It would have been, complacently:
THE END
Notes
49. Treb Samoht (p.170): see Note 8. Eburts: Sidney Strube (1891–1956), English cartoonist, who worked for the Daily Express from 1910 to 1946 when he retired. The most popular of his many characters was, indeed, his ‘Little Man’, symbolising the average Express reader.
50. ‘Queen… baby’: perhaps Princess Margaret, the present Queen’s sister, who was born in 1930.
51. ‘rats of Hamelin… Gadarene swine’: references to Robert Browning’s poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, in which the piper causes all the rats infesting the town to hurl themselves en masse into the river and drown; and to the Bible‚ Matthew 8: 30-2, where devils are destroyed in the headlong rush of a herd of swine ‘down a steep place’ and into the sea.
52. ‘For King and Empire…’: the motto under the tide of the Daily Express.
Copyright
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© Patrick Hamilton, 1939
Introduction © Peter Widdowson, 1999
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ISBN 978–0–571–28364–4