The Chinese Room

by Vivian Connell

  She said nothing, but he did not mind her silence any more. All her body had the gratified blush of love on it, and he began to wander over it with his lips, but no longer in desire. He sensed that she was somehow gone apart, with her soul asleep in that golden field of hair. He kissed her on the instep, and suddenly felt that she was now so much his that he could not bear even her feet covered, and gently took off the right slipper that divided off the foot like wings opening into flight...

  “Oh, my God, I’m sorry!”

  His eye rebounded from her foot like a hammer from the nail. She awoke out of her trance to his shock, but did not start up. He felt the shiver coming down along her body to him. Her whisper was as lonely and tragic as the last whisper in a theater.

  “I am sorry you did that.”

  He could not say anything for a moment. Generations of peasants looked out through his eyes in superstitious horror at that ancient stump of animal hoof. My God, why hadn’t he guessed that she was the girl in Elder’s room. The hoof of Pan, Elder had called the stigma. He could feel her waiting, waiting up there on the pillow for him to come up and say in his eyes that it meant nothing to him. His hands trembled as he closed the innocent wings of the slipper over that ghastly thing. He mustered his control and gently kissed her instep, but she moved her foot, as if she knew it was no more than a gesture now. He made an enormous effort to sound natural. “Why didn’t you get that operated on?”

  “I don’t know. My father was superstitious. He wouldn’t let me.”

  “It makes no difference, anyway.”

  There was a silence, and he still could not pull himself up and take his eyes up to her.

  “Doesn’t it?” She paused, then also pulled herself together. “It’s been a nuisance. I couldn’t go to school, or anything.” She was silent a moment. “I didn’t want you to know about it.” Her voice seemed to be going. “Get me a glass of water, will you?”

  He got up and took his dressing gown and brought a glass of water from the bathroom. When he came back she had closed the nightdress. She was as white and bloodless as Elder looked.

  “Thank you. I’m so thirsty.”

  He smiled back, that dreadful, friendly smile that is an obituary on something and that is the most ghastly of all things that register on the human face. Thoughts now began to pound in his head, and he felt that he had to get away to think about this. He said in a conversational way: “You ought to get that operated on.” His distress produced a kind, awkward jest. “It will tear all your stockings.”

  “Even if I got it down now,” she said, “it would still be there.”

  He thought of Elder saying: “She sees it out of the corner of her mind’s eye all day long.” Now she looked like a child in her pillow of golden hair. He thought of her lying in that opium sleep at Elder’s to get away from it in a distant enchanted sleep. It was clear that Elder had not told her that he had been in the Chinese room. Also it was clear that Elder did not know that she was his mistress, or he would not have talked about her foot. My God, they all had their Chinese rooms, to hide away in from each other. Heavens, he could not bear to stay here any longer.

  “I think I must get my clothes on,” he said.

  He bent and kissed her on the mouth. She accepted it as a child accepts the good-night kiss.

  “You can let yourself out,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll get up again.”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “I won’t forget to leave your payment on the table. You’re a very expensive kept woman, you know!”

  His smile suddenly died out in anguish. He could not bear to see her pride humiliated in tears. She was so beautiful now, her face a white solitude in the golden hair. He must get away. Once he got over the shock, it might be all right. He knew that never in his life again would he touch the exaltation he had reached with her tonight. If this was not love, it was something greater than love.

  He smiled at her and went out, having touched her hand with his lips. He put his clothes on in the bathroom without being aware of one movement he made. When he came out he forgot to leave the money for the orphanage. He avoided looking into her room. If he found her crying in there, by Christ he’d break down into sobbing himself and let his heart bleed out through his eyes.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next morning in the bank was ghastly. When he had got back from her flat last night, he had felt so upset that he got a bottle of whisky from the night porter and made himself drunk in his bedroom before he went to sleep. Nicholas had not been drunk for a long time, and this morning vinegar seemed to be coming up through his blood from his stomach to his mind. The page had already brought him up a second jug of water, and now he drank another glass before she came in with the letters that needed a reply.

  He tried to avoid looking at her, and she avoided looking at him. In some way she reminded him of a young widow who had the ghost of a dead man in her white face. The light seemed to have gone out inside her. They both had to make a desperate effort to deal with the mail. When they had done, he felt he could not stand it any longer. “My God, must I see Ambleside?” he said. “Can’t Strood see him?”

  “Lord Ambleside is an old man, and he might feel hurt.”

  “Very well.” As usual she was right. “For God’s sake, get me some strong tea, and some for yourself.”

  When she had gone out, he wiped the sweat off his face. He sat back in his chair and watched the faces dilating and then disappearing on the white blotting pad. He had never worried much about this trick of his eyes, but the number of faces and the strange looks they had this morning, the way they had of delaying on the pad when he tried to banish them, began to alarm him. He clenched his hands and stared at the white pad and tried to see it empty. But he could not stop his eyes throwing pictures onto the white pad like a projection machine throwing pictures onto a cinema screen. He turned the pad upside down and took out The Times from his case. He decided to try the crossword puzzle to calm himself for Ambleside, but in each white square of the puzzle a small hoof appeared. He gave it up and shut his eyes and got his mind away from the hoof on to the letters.

  What on earth was the connection between her and Elder? He had never guessed they knew each other outside the bank. Well, that was not extraordinary, because Elder obviously did not know she was his mistress. They all seemed to have their private Chinese rooms. Had Elder also a secret hoof of Pan of some kind? Was their connection only because of her need of the opium pipe? Of course they had a cultural communion in their knowledge of Chinese. And they both inhabited that world of literature and painting and science and philosophy that was like a forbidden temple of Asia to him. Nicholas knew that he was afraid of that interior world as he was of that Chinese room in his own mind that held these pictures that came on the blotting pad or occupied the huge mirror of the full moon. He did not like these trans-shifting images that came into his mind. He feared these haunting faces. And above all he dreaded that plasmatic face of Sarah Fuidge clinging to his eyes. He could feel its Stygian damp. Suddenly now he could see Sarah’s face looking out at him from the window of the lodge as he passed in and out the gate of Barrington. Her long yellow tooth stuck into her lower lip like a hoof into the ground. There was always a hunger in her face, and a nostalgia in it, like one saw in the face of an ape at the zoo. Now he wondered if her sexual longing might not have caused her to imagine him as her lover. She had named no one in those letters she wrote accusing herself of having love with a married man, but it might as well be he as anybody. He tried to squeeze this thought out of him between his hands. He did not like it, and hated the thought that in her imagined lust she might have clung her falling dugs to him. Somehow he was able to inhabit her and feel her abnormal moods. He wondered if her ghost could haunt him, trying to pull him away from any other woman. My God, how he hated being able to understand her and to feel the apprehension in her as she waited for those letters....

  “Some tea, Mr. Bude!” He looked up at Miss Coleman’s white
and exhausted face. “Oh, were you asleep?”

  He pulled himself out of the subterranean world of his mind. “No. Just thinking.”

  When she went out of the room, he sat up rigid and tried to shake this other world away. His mind seemed to have become helpless since that shock last night. He must take a holiday when this Dorman business was done. The trouble was that he could not lose himself in his work. It was outside him; he was not interested in it. He knew that she had been right yesterday about the India loan. He had let that be wished on to him simply because he was bored. He would be more careful with the Bude money if it had been his own, not just a gift handed to him on a golden plate. He never had had a chance to dig life out of the ground for himself. In a vague way he knew he was looking for a root to plant himself in the earth and feel a growing up through him. He had that sense of the earth in him. He knew, without caring, that it was that which made him wanted by women. They wanted to get back into the jungle with him. He was not really afraid of this dark jungle world which Sarah had inhabited. If he could once get inside it, he could fight a way out through the tangled undergrowth of his mind into the sunlight. But he was shut up in a cage with gold bars that his hands wanted to wrench asunder. Perhaps it was some ancestor of Sidonie’s who had felt the same and had grown that hoof to kick down the door.

  My God, here were those faces on the white pad again, with a hoof sticking out of each mouth. His hand had turned up the pad because his mind had wanted to get those faces out somewhere that were haunting that dark inside room. Now he even knew why he kept that pad always unused and clean. The faces kept on painting themselves on the white pad until Lord Ambleside was announced.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Nicholas was only vaguely aware of how he got through that day and through that week. His mind seemed to sleep all day at the bank and wake at night as he roamed the countryside under the moon growing round. Quite suddenly he got into a kinship with the earth. Listening to the mice as they rustled in the cornstalks; lying on the ground by a heap of earth that erupted from a hole, to hear the moles in their tunnels; starting at the hysterical chirp of a squirrel at dusk; marking the shush into the water of an otter; all his senses sharpened into attention like players in an orchestra waiting on the baton for the entry. So innumerable were the sounds, he noted, that it was the silences that had the most inflection. He began to stay out very late and dread the return to a slumber tenanted by those visitors who came and went on the white blotting pad by day and passed through a turnstile in his mind all night long. Muriel this week was not a bother in his blood, and his body in some way seemed to be only a corporal shell inhabited by his mind. He had a sense of being in a pause, and as Monday came near, he realized that all his existence now seemed to be a pause between those letters.

  He had done all the obvious things to locate the sender. He had compared the typescript with samples from Elder’s machine and Sidonie’s under the microscope, only to convince himself that here lay no clue. He guessed anyway that neither of them would be fool enough to use an office machine. If Elder had not his kink of the Chinese room, if Sidonie had not the kink of that hoof, he could not have believed it possible that either of such two intelligent people could do such a thing. They might be eccentric, but they were not abnormal. A neurotic like Saluby, whose clever brain seemed not to belong to his mean character, was more capable of such a sinister attack on a man’s mind. But there was no way on earth that he could think of in which Saluby could obtain that paper. Nicholas had tried to get the paper matched in nearly every shop in London, and had failed. None of them seemed to recognize the maker, and most of them guessed that it was a very old paper. Saluby could obtain it only in complicity with Muriel, and it was impossible to believe that anybody so normal as she was could lend herself to such an idea. Besides, she now seemed fully occupied by herself and to have discovered a new existence that gave her the feeling of excitement she communicated to him.

  He was thinking over all this on Sunday night and, unaware, had come back from the upland by the lodge path. Always he had avoided going near the lodge on his nightly walk, inventing to himself reasons why another way was more interesting. But now he found himself almost in the plot behind the lodge and was startled to see what he thought was Sarah’s ghost. His heart gave a wild jump, and then he resolved himself and went up and saw that it was her long white nightdress which old Fuidge must have washed out before he gave it away in charity. Nicholas almost laughed aloud at himself and turned down the path to the Hall. His boot slipped on something, and he bent down and picked up a small hoof that must have belonged to a baby deer who had got killed perhaps by jumping at the wire as they sometimes did. He did not know why, but this tiny hoof, not much bigger than Sidonie’s, seemed a bad omen. It was queer that he had come down here by accident and found it by the lodge. He had a queer feeling that Sarah might have dropped it there out of her hand. For some unaccountable reason he put it in his pocket and wondered if any of his peasant forefathers had regarded such a thing as a sign. He took it out of his pocket, but his hand refused to throw it away.

  He looked up at the empty white moon and thought that Sidonie’s face had become like it. He remembered a queer remark that old Fuidge had made: “The moon was aching up in the sky that night before Sarah died.” And in the same way all this week Sidonie’s face had seemed to be aching in loneliness. He wondered now if she perhaps loved him after all, and because of that stigma had feared to let him know. She could never marry knowing that it would be discovered. He knew that much as he hated fuss, he would have divorced Muriel for her, if she had shown she loved him. There was no reason why she should marry anybody. She had beauty and brains and breeding, and people like Ambleside always talked to her as an equal. And she had made herself a bride for him that last Monday night. He guessed that she had, as she said, simply got tired and given in, taken off guard by the accident of his coming early, and ashamed of herself for telling him a lie. He knew there was no lie in her. And in his heart he knew that she had never given herself to another man. Good as her salary was now, he did not know how she could afford that flat, but he knew there was nothing sinister in the explanation. But whatever the sight of that hoof had done to him, he knew that he only felt bound to her now by something like that last silken thread that Elder had mentioned as holding the soul to the clay.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Nicholas got to the bank on Monday, ha had so exhausted himself by anticipation that now he felt almost empty of fear. He sat at his desk waiting for Miss Coleman to bring in the mail and felt like a person on the operating table. In a moment the doctor would come in, and there was nothing to be done about it. He drank a glass of water and wondered what was delaying Miss Coleman and wished to God that she would come in and give him the letter and get it over.

  When she came in, he saw that she had somehow regained herself over the week end. There was that sense of coldness in her again. She put the tray of letters down and handed him the Personal letter. Usually, she laid his personal letters by him, but today she handed him the single letter and watched him closely, and, although he knew she was watching him, he could not hide the unwillingness of his hand to receive the letter. “Put it down!” he said sharply.

  She put it down and said distinctly: “I wanted to ask you about it.” She paused. “You asked me last Monday if I knew anything about this letter.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “There must have been some reason.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Very well.” She paused. “But you don’t seem to like getting that letter.” She paused again. “I was just wondering.”

  “Wondering what?”

  “Well, I thought first it might be that letter you said you were going to write to yourself as an experiment, but I can’t understand why it has been postmarked from all over the country.”

  “You seem to have been taking rather a
lot of notice of it.”

  “There is no need to be nasty. You know I am not interested in your personal letters, but I can’t help noticing one that comes every Monday morning.”

  “Why the hell shouldn’t it come on Monday?” said Nicholas in a random way.

  “I know nothing about it, but it just occurs to me now that Monday is the one day on which it would arrive regularly from any part of the country.”

  “Anything else you have noticed?” asked Nicholas in what he hoped she would think a sarcastic way.

  She took up the letter and paused for a moment. “Yes, now that I think of it, the postmarks have been coming nearer to London.” She looked at the envelope. “This one is S. W. I.—right on the doorstep.”

  Nicholas knew that she had seen his start. He put his hands out of sight, and continued in what he thought was a sarcastic voice. “Do you pay this attention to all my personal letters?”