'I have told her,' said Emerald very petulantly, and withdrawing her head. 'She won't do it.'
'Nonsense,' said the other. 'You're just telling lies.' I got the idea that thus she always spoke to Emerald.
Then the doors opened, and I could see the two of them silhouetted in the light of a lamp which stood on a table behind them; one much the taller, but both with round heads, and both wearing long, unshapely garments. I wanted very much to escape, and failed to do so only because there seemed nowhere to go.
'Please come in at once,' said the taller figure, 'and let us take off your wet clothes.'
'Yes, yes,' squeaked Emerald, unreasonably jubilant.
'Thank you. But my clothes are not at all wet.'
'None the less, please come in. We shall take it as a discourtesy if you refuse.'
Another roar of thunder emphasised the impracticability of continuing to refuse much longer. If this was a dream, doubtless, and to judge by experience, I should awake.
And a dream it must be, because there at the front door were two big wooden wedges; and there to the right of the Hall, shadowed in the lamplight, was the Trophy Room; although now the animal heads on the walls were shoddy, fungoid ruins, their sawdust spilled and clotted on the cracked and uneven flagstones of the floor.
'You must forgive us,' said my tall hostess. 'Our landlord neglects us sadly, and we are far gone in wrack and ruin. In fact, I do not know what we should do were it not for our own resources.' At this Emerald cackled. Then she came up to me, and began fingering my clothes.
The tall one shut the door.
'Don't touch,' she shouted at Emerald, in her deep, rather grinding voice. 'Keep your fingers off.'
She picked up the large oil lamp. Her hair was a discoloured white in its beams.
'I apologise for my sister,' she said. 'We have all been so neglected that some of us have quite forgotten how to behave. Come, Emerald.'
Pushing Emerald before her, she led the way.
In the Occasional Room and the Morning Room, the gilt had flaked from the gingerbread furniture, the family portraits stared from their heavy frames, and the striped wallpaper drooped in the lamplight like an assembly of sodden, half-inflated balloons.
At the door of the Canton Cabinet, my hostess turned. 'I am taking you to meet my sisters,' she said.
'I look forward to doing so,' I replied, regardless of truth, as in childhood.
She nodded slightly, and proceeded. 'Take care,' she said. 'The floor has weak places.'
In the little Canton Cabinet, the floor had, in fact, largely given way, and been plainly converted into a hospice for rats.
And then, there they all were, the remaining six of them thinly illumined by what must surely be rushlights in the four shapely chandeliers. But now, of course, I could see their faces.
'We are all named after our birthstones,' said my hostess. 'Emerald you know. I am Opal. Here are Diamond and Garnet, Cornelian and Chrysolite. The one with the grey hair is Sardonyx, and the beautiful one is Turquoise.'
They all stood up. During the ceremony of introduction, they made odd little noises.
'Emerald and I are the eldest, and Turquoise of course is the youngest.'
Emerald stood in the corner before me, rolling her dyed-red head. The Long Drawing Room was raddled with decay. The cobwebs gleamed like steel filigree in the beam of the lamp, and the sisters seemed to have been seated in cocoons of them, like cushions of gossamer.
'There is one other sister, Topaz. But she is busy writing.'
'Writing all our diaries,' said Emerald.
'Keeping the record,' said my hostess.
A silence followed.
'Let us sit down,' said my hostess. 'Let us make our visitor welcome.'
The six of them gently creaked and subsided into their former places. Emerald and my hostess remained standing.
'Sit down, Emerald. Our visitor shall have my chair as it is the best.' I realised that inevitably there was no extra seat.
'Of course not,' I said. 'I can only stay for a minute. I am waiting for the rain to stop,' I explained feebly to the rest of them.
'I insist,' said my hostess.
I looked at the chair to which she was pointing. The padding was burst and rotten, the woodwork bleached and crumbling to collapse. All of them were watching me with round, vague eyes in their flat faces.
'Really,' I said, 'no, thank you, It's kind of you, but I must go.' All the same, the surrounding wood and the dark marsh beyond it loomed scarcely less appalling than the house itself and its inmates.
'We should have more to offer, more and better in every way, were it not for our landlord.' She spoke with bitterness, and it seemed to me that on all the faces the expression changed. Emerald came towards me out of her corner, and again began to finger my clothes. But this time her sister did not correct her, and when I stepped away, she stepped after me and went on as before.
'She has failed in the barest duty of sustentation.'
I could not prevent myself starting at the pronoun. At once, Emerald caught hold of my dress, and held it tightly.
'But there is one place she cannot spoil for us. One place where we can entertain in our own way.'
'Please,' I cried. 'Nothing more. I am going now.'
Emerald's pygmy grip tautened.
'It is the room where we eat.'
All the watching eyes lighted up, and became something they had not been before.
'I may almost say where we feast.'
The six of them began again to rise from their spidery bowers.
'Because she cannot go there.'
The sisters clapped their hands, like a rustle of leaves.
'There we can be what we really are.'
The eight of them were now grouped round me. I noticed that the one pointed out as the youngest was passing her dry, pointed tongue over her lower lip.
'Nothing unladylike, of course.'
'Of course not,' I agreed.
'But firm,' broke in Emerald, dragging at my dress as she spoke. 'Father said that must always come first.'
'Our father was a man of measureless wrath against a slight,' said my hostess. 'It is his continuing presence about the house which largely upholds us.'
'Shall I show her?' asked Emerald.
'Since you wish to,' said her sister disdainfully.
From somewhere in her musty garments Emerald produced a scrap of card, which she held out to me.
'Take it in your hand. I'll allow you to hold it.'
It was a photograph, obscurely damaged.
'Hold up the lamp,' squealed Emerald. With an aloof gesture her sister raised it.
It was a photograph of myself when a child, bobbed and waistless. And through my heart was a tiny brown needle.
'We've all got things like it,' said Emerald jubilantly. 'Wouldn't you think her heart would have rusted away by now?'
'She never had a heart,' said the elder sister scornfully, putting down the light.
'She might not have been able to help what she did,' I cried.
I could hear the sisters catch their fragile breath.
'It's what you do that counts,' said my hostess, regarding the discoloured floor, 'not what you feel about it afterwards. Our father always insisted on that. It's obvious.'
'Give it back to me,' said Emerald, staring into my eyes. For a moment I hesitated.
'Give it back to her,' said my hostess in her contemptuous way. 'It makes no difference now. Everyone but Emerald can see that the work is done.'
I returned the card, and Emerald let go of me as she stuffed it away.
'And now will you join us?' asked my hostess. 'In the inner room?' As far as was possible, her manner was almost casual.
'I am sure the rain has stopped,' I replied. 'I must be on my way.'
'Our father would never have let you go so easily, but I think we have done what we can with you.'
I inclined my head.
'Do not trouble with adieux
,' she said. 'My sisters no longer expect them.' She picked up the lamp. 'Follow me. And take care. The floor has weak places.'
'Goodbye,' squealed Emerald.
'Take no notice, unless you wish,' said my hostess.
I followed her through the mouldering rooms and across the rotten floors in silence. She opened both the outer doors and stood waiting for me to pass through. Beyond, the moon was shining, and she stood dark and shapeless in the silver flood.
On the threshold, or somewhere on the far side of it, I spoke.
'I did nothing,' I said. 'Nothing.'
So far from replying, she dissolved into the darkness and silently shut the door.
I took up my painful, lost, and forgotten way through the wood, across the dreary marsh, and back to the little yellow road.
Never Visit Venice (1968)
Travel is a good thing; it stimulates the imagination. Everything else is a snare and a delusion. Our own journey is entirely imaginative. Therein lies its strength. – LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE
Henry Fern was neither successful in the world's eyes nor unsuccessful; partly because he lived in a world society in which to be either requires considerable craft. Fern was not good at material scheming. His job stood far below his theoretical capacities, but he had a very clear idea of his own defects, and was inclined inwardly to believe that but for one or two strokes of sheer good fortune, he would have been a mere social derelict. He did not sufficiently understand that it has been made almost impossible to be a social derelict.
Not that Fern was adapted to that status any better than to the status of tycoon. Like most introverts, he was very dependent upon small, minute-to-minute comforts, no matter whence they came. Fern's gaze upon life was very decisively inwards. He read much. He reflected much. One of his purest pleasures was an entire day in bed; all by himself, in excellent health. He lived in a quite pleasant surburban flat, with a view over a park. Unfortunately, the park, for the most part, was more beautiful when Fern was not there; because when he was there, it tended to fill with raucous loiterers and tiny piercing radios.
Fern was an only child. His parents were far off and in poorer circumstances than when he had been a boy. He had much difficulty, not perhaps in making friends, but in keeping up an interest in them. There seemed to be something in him which made him different from most of the people he encountered in the office or in the train or in the park or at the houses of others. He could not succeed in defining what this difference was, and he simultaneously congratulated and despised himself for having it. He would sincerely have liked to be rid of it, but at the same time was pretty sure it was the best thing about him. If only others were interested in the best!
One thing it plainly did was hold Fern back in what people called his career. Here it did damage in several different ways. That it disconnected him from the network of favour and promotion was only the most obvious. Much worse was that it made favour and promotion seem to Fern doubtfully worth while. Worse still was that it made him see through the work he had to do: see that, like so much that is called work, it was little more than protective colouration; but see also that the blank disclosure of this fact would destroy not merely the work itself and his own income, but the hopes of the many who were committed to at least a half-belief in its importance, even when they chafed against it. Worst of all probably was the simple fact that this passionate division inside him ate up his energy and sent it to waste. Fern would have liked to be an artist, but seemed to himself to have little creative talent. He soon realised that it has become a difficult world for those who possibly are artists only in living. There is so little scope for practice and rehearsal.
Nor could Fern find a woman who seemed to feel in the least as he did. Having heard and read often that it is useless to seek for one's ideal woman, that the very fancy of an ideal woman is an absurdity, he at first made up his mind to concentrate upon the good qualities that were actually to be found, which were undoubtedly many, at least by accepted standards. He even became engaged to be married on two occasions; but the more he saw of each fiancée, despite her beauty and charm of character, the more he felt himself an alien and an imposter. Unable to dissemble any more, he had himself broken off the engagement. He had felt much anguish, but it was not, he felt, anguish of the right kind. Even in that he seemed isolated. The women must have realised something of the truth, because though both, when he spoke, expressed aggressive dismay, since marriage is so much sought after for itself, they soon went quietly, and were heard of by Fern no more. Now he was nearing forty: not, he thought, unhappy, when all was considered; but he could not do so much considering every day, and often he felt puzzled and sadly lonely. Things could be so very much worse, and that very easily, as none knew better than Fern; but this reflection, well justified though it was, did not prevent Fern from thinking, not infrequently, of suicide, or from letting the back of his mind dwell pleasurably and recurrently upon the thought of Death's warm, white, and loving arms.
One thing about which Fern felt true anguish was the problem of travel, or, as others put it, his 'holidays'.
Here the shortage of money really mattered. 'Why do I not go out for more?' he asked himself.
He had no difficulty in answering himself. Apart from the obvious doubt as to whether it was a good bargain to sell himself further into slavery in order to receive in return perhaps seven more days each year for travel and enough extra money to travel a little (a very little) more comfortably, he saw well that even these rewards might be vitiated by the extra care that would probably travel with the recipient of them. He realised early that, except for a few natural bohemians, travel can be of value only when based upon private resources: hence the almost universal adulteration of travel into organised tourism, an art into a science, so that the shrinking surface of the earth, in its physical aspect as in its way of life, becomes a single place, not worth leaving home to see. Fern saw this very clearly, but it was considerably too wide and theoretical a consideration to deter one so truly a traveller but who had yet travelled so little as Fern. What really held Fern back from travel, as from much else, was the lack of a fellow-traveller, remembering always that this fellow-traveller had to comply pretty nearly with an ideal which Fern could by no means define, but could only sense and serve, present or (as almost always) absent beyond reasonable hope.
He had shared a holiday with both his fiancées – one holiday in each case. Much the same things had happened each time; doubtless because men notoriously involve themselves (even when they do it half-heartedly) with the same woman in different shapes, or, perhaps, as Lord Chesterfield says, because women are so much more alike than are men. On each occasion, it had been two or three weeks of differing objectives, conscious and unconscious, at all levels, and, especially, of utterly different responses to everything encountered; but a matter also of determined and scrupulous effort on both sides not only to understand but to act upon and make allowances for the other's point of view. All these things had made of the holiday a reproduction of extension of common life, which was not at all what Fern had in mind. Both parties had, in the American formula, 'worked at' the relationship, worked as hard as slaves under an overseer; but the produce was unmarketable. 'You're too soulful about everything,' complained one of the girls. She spoke quite affectionately, and truly for his own good, as the world goes, and as Fern perceived. None the less, he came to surmise that for him travel might be a mystical undertaking. He had some time read of Renan's concept that for each man there is an individual 'means to salvation': for some the ascent to Monsalvat, for some alcohol or laudanum, for some wenching and whoring, for some even the common business of day-to-day life. For Fern salvation might lie in travel; but surely not in solitary travel. And how much more difficult than ever this new consideration would make finding a companion! Almost, how impossible! Fern felt his soul (as the girl had called it) shrink when he first clearly sensed the hopeless conflict between deepest need and inevitable absence of res
ponse; the conflict which makes even men and women who are capable of better things live as they do. He and the girl were on a public seat in Bruges at the time; among the trees along the Dyver, looking at the swans on the canal.
At least politeness had been maintained on these trips; from first to last. It was something by no means to be despised. Moreover, when Fern had travelled with others, with a man friend, or with a party, he had fared considerably worse. Then there had been little in the way of manners and no obligation even to essay mutuality. In the longer run, therefore, Fern had travelled little and enjoyed less. This in no way modified his unwordly attitude to travel. He knew that few people do enjoy it, despite the ever-increasing number who set forth; and resented the fact that actual experience of travel had seemed, for practical purposes, to put him among the majority – of them, but not with them, as usual. Nor could he see even the possibility of a solution. Not enough money. Not enough time. And no intimates, let alone initiates. It had been quite bad enough even when he had only been twenty-five.
Fern began to have a dream. Foreshadowings or intimations came to him first; thereafter, at irregular intervals, the whole experience (in so far as it could be described as a whole), or bits or scraps of it, portions or distortions. There seemed to be no system in its total or partial recurrence. As far as Fern was concerned, it merely did not come often enough. He felt that it would be unlucky (by which he meant destructive) to note too precisely the dates of the dream's reappearances. But Fern was soon musing about the content of the dream during waking hours; sometimes even by policy and on purpose. To the infrequent dream of the night, he added an increasing habit of deliberate daydreaming; a pastime so disapproved of by the experts.
Fern's dream, though glowing, was simple.
He dreamed that he was in Venice, where he had never been. He was drifting in a gondola across an expanse of water he had read about, called the Lagoon. Lying in his embrace at the bottom of the boat was a woman in evening dress or party dress or gay dress of some kind. He did not know how he had met her: whether in Venice or in London. Conceivably, even, he knew her already, outside the dream; had long known her, or at least set eyes on her. When he awoke, he could never remember her face with sufficient clarity; or perhaps could remember only for a moment or two after waking, in the manner of dreams. It was a serious frustration, because the woman was very desirable, and because between Fern and her, and between them only as far as Fern was concerned, was understanding and affinity. Such understanding could not last, Fern realised even in the dream: it might not last beyond that one night; or it might last as long as six or seven days. Fern could always remember the woman's dress: but it was not always the same dress; it was sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes crimson, sometimes mottled like a fish. Above the boat, were always stars, and always the sky was a peculiarly deep lilac, which lingered with Fern and which he had never seen in the world exterior to the dream. There was never a moon, but behind the gondola, along some kind of waterfront, sparkled the raffish, immemorial, and evocative lights of Fern's hypothetical Venice. Ahead, in contrast, lay a long, dark reef, with occasional and solitary lights only. There were tiny waves lapping round the gondola, and Fern was in some way aware of bigger waves beating slowly on the far side of the reef. He never knew where the two of them were going, but they were going somewhere, because journeys without destination are as work without product: the product may disappoint, but is indispensible and has to be borne. Fern wished that he could enter the dream at an earlier point, so that he might have some idea of how he had met the woman, but always when awareness began, the pair of them were a long way out across the water with the string of gaudy lights far behind. For some reason, Fern had an idea that he had met the woman by eager but slightly furtive arrangement, outside an enormous hotel, very fashionable and luxurious. The gondolier was always vague: Fern had read and been told that, since the advent of powered craft, gondoliers were costly and difficult. (None the less, this one seemed, whatever the explanation, to be devoted and amenable.)
The Collected Short Fiction Page 21