"Exactly ..." he whispered, "water .... But what's the dripping water saying? Listen!"
"Good God ... how am Ito know? True ... it is a bit like a telegraph message ... It's ticking out ... but I don't know what ... I don't know Morse Code. Tap ... tap tap ... tap tap ... that's all. Darling, it's childish! Let it drip. You know yourself it's childish. You are tired, that's what it is. Come, you must lie down ..."
She pulled him towards the bed.
"Get undressed," she ordered him firmly.
"But what are you ..." he was trying to resist. "It's only eight o'clock, it's just got dark."
"Get undressed, you're ill ..."
"No, no, we'll have some tea and then I shall see. Anyway, I'm not ill, it's only a headache. Don't worry about it ... Sometimes, after work, my brain goes into overdrive. It's a terrible job, Tonia, I can tell you ... a terrible job."
She busied herself at the table, pleased that he had started talking sense again.
"Blast it!" she cried out suddenly. "We've run out of sugar ... Wait, I'll nip out to the corner shop..
"Let me ... I'll go," he said hurriedly.
He took his hat, threw a coat over his shoulders and left.
Passing through the kitchen he closed his eyes so as not to see the damned tap. But he could not stop his ears and so he heard that maddening, stupid dripping, which he could not help taking for a kind of telegram.
"Strange Street, number 36 ... Strange Street ... number 36 ..." It followed him as he hurried down the stairs.
Outside he looked around for a policeman. He saw one standing across the road, at the other end of the street. In front of the shop he hesitated, put his hands in his pockets and slowed down. Then, as if pushed by some compulsion, he passed the shop's door and quickly walked on. In order to approach the constable he had to cross the road. Without thinking, and contrary to his meticulous habits, he stepped right into a muddy puddle. For a second he registered an unpleasant sensation, surprised that he was doing something so foolish, but he waded on.
"Excuse me, officer," he said lifting his hat, "where is Strange Street? Do you know such a street?"
The policeman looked down at him, observing him in silence, then turned on his heel and slowly walked away, apparently offended.
Frank sighed with relief. If it would not have made him look silly he would have given this guardian of law and order a big kiss. So, it was all nonsense after all, he thought.
He turned back towards the shop, where the lights were still on.
Inside, the shop was crowded. He stood at the counter next to an elderly gentleman, who evidently was not completely sober, one could smell it. He searched through his pockets with difficulty, looking for money, and then counted it out very slowly.
For some reason Frank asked him in a whisper:
"Excuse me, sir ... Do you know where Strange Street is?"
The gentleman kept counting out the money; he had not heard the question. At long last he received his package, but still waited. They found themselves on the street together.
"What is your name, young man?" asked the gentleman.
"Frank Grey," he answered surprised.
"And I am John Nevermind. That is my name since I started visiting Strange Street."
"Where is this street?"
"You would like to know, wouldn't you?"
"I would."
"And have you got much to lose? How much?"
"Money ... money ... I haven't got much money ..." he stammered out.
"Not money! Have you got much to lose in life?"
"In life? ... Nothing, almost nothing. .
"Good! Let's go."
Frank felt somewhat odd. He did not trust the man. He would rather go there alone.
"Someone is waiting for me. .
"A woman?"
He did not answer.
"Spit on it, I say. Spit! Let's go. But I'll tell you straight away, there is no return from there. You've got to know that in advance. You will return in flesh but never in spirit. Never!"
Frank shuddered. This man was not drunk. He pulled his arm away from the other's friendly grasp.
"No, I shan't go. But please, tell me where it is."
"Everywhere and nowhere."
"I don't understand."
"I know. Now, tell me, how did you find out about this street?"
"I can't tell you!"
"All right, all right," laughed the old man. "You haven't learnt it, I suppose, from any decent citizen."
"No, it sort of occurred to me."
"Excellent! Wonderful!" John Nevermind was pleased. "Some dream about it at night, to others it occurs while they are daydreaming. Excellent. I'm telling you, let's go."
Frank resisted.
"Please, tell me where it is, what is there. I'll go alone."
"It's nowhere! You understand? Just like there is no happiness, love, goodness ... or clairvoyance. Yet it's everywhere, for it may come along at any time just like all those things. This very moment, in a second, you could find yourself on Strange Street which leads through life. So called decent citizens walk along Straight Street, Dignified, Senator Street. We, we go down Strange Street, Abysmal, Out-of-this-World Street."
"But you wanted to take me somewhere. .
"Where? To my flat, where I live. I wanted to make you my pupil."
"And yet. . . " he said disappointed, "yet I know it is somewhere ... in Strange Street, number 36."
"That is my address."
"Strange. Very strange," whispered Frank Grey. "How could I know that?"
"Don't ask. As yet, this question is too difficult for you. One day you will be able to answer it yourself I'm telling you, come with me. You will be my pupil."
"And what then?"
"I feel you have the calling. I will show you a path which leads beyond the working fields of life, into free, divine way- wardness ..."
"And what will I find there?"
"Freedom and wisdom. Raptures which no human breast can withstand, love which today would turn you into ashes. I shall teach your heart and one day it will become a vessel full of heavenly nectar."
He was listening surprised, frightened.
"I'll come tomorrow . . ."
"You'll never come if you don't come now. Come with me.
Frank wrenched his arm away again and stepping back he said firmly:
"I shall come tomorrow!"
"There is no tomorrow, only today ... You have found a treasure and you want to pick it up tomorrow only because today you still have to pick up some rags? Think ... just think!"
Frank took off his hat, he felt cold sweat on his brow. He was shivering nervously.
"Please, sir, give me your address. I give you my word I'll come tomorrow evening and will be happy to listen to you. Today I really can't."
You can't ..." the old man laughed quietly. "Ah, I knew you could not. There were so many of you and none could, each still had something else to do ... just at that moment ... on Lord Street, or Obvious, or Beautiful Street ... Well ... go,go...
"Please give me your address," asked Frank.
"My address? But you know it ..."
"I don't! Tell me exactly how to get there ..."
The gentleman turned around and walked away without a word.
Frank Grey watched him go with deep regret. Then he shuddered, for the old man, having walked a few steps, suddenly disappeared, as if he had dissolved into the darkness.
Frank was struck by fear. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. He realised he was standing inside the shop, leaning against the wall. The owner was looking at him with pity.
"Feeling poorly, are we?"
He did not answer. He paid, took his packet and quickly ran home.
Leaping up the stairs he got to his flat, pulled the door open and stopped dead in his tracks. He listened, straining his ears without taking his eyes off the water tap. Not a drop fell into the sink.
He was overcome by a great, uncontainable
sorrow.
He burst into the room and, turning to Tonia, shouted till the window-panes rattled in their frames:
"Get out!"
He was standing white as a sheet, pointing to the door, his teeth chattering.
"Have you gone mad?" she asked frightened.
"Out!" he shouted again and stamped his foot.
She started picking up her clothes, pale, sad and deeply hurt, her chest heaving with a stifled sob.
Feeling that his legs were giving way, he fell onto the bed and burst into tears.
"Frank! Frank!" cried Tonia.
She put her arms around him and wept with him.
Zenon spent almost three days on the streets. On the morning after the inexplicable arrival of the letter he got up early, read the mysterious message again and, having dressed hastily, left the hotel. After that he wandered through the streets of London, sleeping and eating wherever and whenever he found the need.
He roamed the town for a long time, fleeing and yet searching, avoiding and yet unable to pull himself away from the crowds, examining closely every face, looking into every pair of eyes with fear, trembling with the impatient hope of catching a meaningful look, or hearing a word, or seeing a sign that what had been foretold would become real there and then.
He was oblivious to the cold, the rain, the fog and the time of day, wandering from place to place, often waiting for hours on street-corners or lurking around shop-windows, observing the passers-by and trying to make out their faces in the dark, running after anyone who seemed to give him a meaningful look. Sometimes he would enter a restaurant or a crowded pub to have a rest but as soon as he had scanned all the faces there he would leave his drink unfinished and be on his feet again. He felt he had to go on searching, go on waiting.-. .
"Search - follow - do not ask - be fearless - S-O-F reveals secrets." The powerful, inexorable command of the words in the letter still resounded in his head.
He had not the slightest will to resist, he was like the fist of an unforgiving hand thrust towards an unknown target, following its course blindly, indifferent to anything but that dark, mysterious compulsion. And yet he had complete presence of mind and was conscious of what was going on around him, except that he felt all his connections with his past life had been broken. He thought about it the way one thinks about strange stories heard a long time ago which are already drowning in the depths of oblivion.
"What is going to happen?" he thought in the rare moments of inner awakening which made him want to tear from the unknown future its secret. But the mist in which he was groping would not lift, the vicious circle of his vain pursuit would not break, he had to go on searching, he had to wait.
He would spend hours in the City, tossed on the waves of the crowd, surveying it, calm and remote, with his tense and hungry eyes. He visited museums, ventured deep into empty, wet and misty parks, walked along the embankment, travelled on all the omnibuses constantly changing routes, looked into banks and theatres, circled London on the underground. He went everywhere in his untiring, unremitting, feverish pursuit of an elusive shadow, always vigilant and full of hope, calm and confident he would find what he was looking for.
Even the policemen began to notice his pale face and wild eyes, at once empty and penetrating, constantly searching the crowd, and his unpredictable behaviour, as time and again he would plunge straight into the thickest flow of carriages and omnibuses, right under the horses' hoofs, emerging miraculously unhurt and oblivious of any danger. He was slowly losing his sense of reality in this mad pursuit after the unknown, perhaps even the non-existent. His attention, strained to its limits, ceased to register people in their individual forms, and now they appeared to him as one monstrous reptile with a thousand heads and legs writhing in a ceaseless, hollow, terrifying hum.
The whole of London seemed to him a fantastic jungle, vast and lifeless yet full of strange, dreadful and mysterious apparitions which he could not apprehend, but which he felt floating around in a perpetual state of becoming. And so he wandered in silence, with a vague, inexplicable sense of awe, thinking he was beginning to catch a glimpse of what was hidden before his mortal eyes - anima mundi - the soul of the world...
He walked through the town as if through a stone-built fairy tale full of glittering trees he had never seen before. Now and again he would see an ailing, suffering house, bending under the weight of centuries, scarred with wounds and groaning with exhaustion; he would feel the painful shiver of trees drowned in the fog, dying and longing for the sun, for fresh spring breezes; he heard their never-ending moan and saw their tears rolling slowly down their sick branches.
He stopped before the Tower of London. It stood in sombre reverie, a tragically lonely remnant of days long past, rising loftily in its loneliness and proud contempt for the new life, the new days milling in squalor at the feet of its immortal majesty. But he ran away in panic from the insipid, rich but stupid palaces of the West End, which had seemed to jeer at him with their greasy, impudent voices of good reason, and equally he avoided the huge stores and shops where the lands of the world bemoaned their looted riches.
He would often become lost while listening to the lazy colloquy of the misty parks, or to the servile, mean whisperings of the erect, sentinel hedges. He listened to the birds flying past unseen shrieking out their woeful tales, he spoke to the homeless dogs living on the rotting rubbish dumps, who later followed him in packs. Everywhere and in everything he felt a soul full of pain, witnessed the tragic necessity of existence and the interminable violence of the brutal force of fate. Even the stone of the statues in Hyde Park seemed to be accusing those who had dragged them from the womb of eternal silence into the light of day. The ever-flowing waters of the Thames murmured their lament while the worn out, rusty machines, forged and bound by human thought and abandoned on the banks, tugged powerless at their moorings, groaning their quiet complaints at the never-ending toil of existence.
In the end he felt he was in a barely remembered dream, trembling and falling like a star into depths of infinity.
Then, without knowing how or why, Zenon found himself in Westminster Abbey, sitting almost dead with exhaustion under one of the statues, totally oblivious to what had happened to him or to the world around him. The sacred silence of the graves sobered him up a little. The statues, leaning towards him, stared at him with their wide open eyes, and the deep silence began to swell with their mute message. He shuddered and began making his way slowly through that stony crowd towards the exit.
He was in the transept, near the exit, when he stopped suddenly and hid again among the white statues. He saw a shadowy, but familiar, slender figure come through the main entrance, then turn to the left into a high, narrow aisle encircling the choir with a row of royal chapels. He followed her into the twilight of the aisle, where only high up, in the blackened network of the gothic ribbing, smouldered remnants of daylight, while below complete darkness reigned.
Daisy stood in front of one of the chapels and, leaning against the iron lattice, looked at a sarcophagus.
"I knew I would meet you," he whispered stopping by her side.
She gave him a stern look as if ordering silence.
He did not feel tired any more; the insane feeling had slipped from his soul like a dirty rag. He was a normal, ordinary man again.
"They feel better here, in the kingdom of eternal silence," he whispered again.
"Who knows? If their souls are still bound to their bodily image they will have to wander trapped in matter, and be here filling these aisles with their moans and longings for as long as this bronze and marble last, until Time turns everything into rubble and frees them to return to their destinies."
"That would be too terrible," Zenon shrugged off the vision.
"Who knows what one's life or death depends on, what binds a man and what redeems him?"
"S-O-F," he said slowly, almost against his will, the way one voices things deeply lodged in one's brain which suddenly come to on
e's lips of their own accord.
He felt her sway as she leaned on his shoulder for a moment, but she did not explain.
They moved on, stopping at all the chapels, which were drowning in the ever thickening darkness as only a dying glow emanated from the stained-glass windows.
"I haven't seen you for a long time," she said with an unusual softness, almost a reproach.
"A long time?" He was surprised, remembering suddenly the scene of flagellation and all the suspicions he had been trying so desperately to forget.
"You disappeared three days ago. Tracy began to worry about you."
"Three days! ... No ... I left today, maybe yesterday ... no . . . really, it's never happened to me before, I can't remember ..."
"You can't remember those three days?" A question rang discreetly in her voice.
"No, of course not. I know, today after breakfast you played on the harmonium in the reading-room." He was talking fast, struggling with his memory.
You are mistaken. I haven't touched the keyboard for three days."
"So, what's happened to me? For three days ..." he whispered fearfully.
He saw in his mind torn and misty images of something he could not properly focus upon in order to bring it out into the light.
"And yet ... yet, I have been waiting for you."
She did not answer. The wardens, making their rounds with their torches before closing the abbey, began to ring the bell. They came out onto the square outside.
"Sometimes we forget our own existence or look at it as if it were not ours, as if it were happening outside of us. And sometimes the soul is carried away in some mysterious whirl and loses the body without even being aware of it," she continued, deep in thought.
"So I too must have got lost in time then, I must have...
Just then they reached the corner of Victoria Street and she gave him her hand.
"You are not going home?" he asked, shaking off the dreamy mood.
"I have to see my friends from Calcutta before dinner." She said it cheerfully and in the light pouring out of the shop-windows and street-lamps he saw on her face a strangely sweet and friendly expression, the like of which he had never seen before. She looked straight into his eyes softly, almost tenderly and when she looked again from the departing cab he was overjoyed. He stared after her for a long time and then stopped a cab and immediately went back to the hotel, hurrying the driver all the way.
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