by Jean Cocteau
It seemed a stage, set for the sound of a casement cautiously pushed up, the muffled thud of a stealthy leap, the spark of a torch in darkness.
Silence and spectral sheen recalled the old rue Montmartre drawing-room frailly suspended in a cage of snow-light, and even tenuously suggested the snowbound, shrunken aspect of the Cité Monthiers just before the battle. There was the same sense of isolation, of expectancy; and in the high windows a faint simulacrum of those pallid walls.
Altogether the room seemed the result of one of those fantastic aberrations or miscalculations, comparable to the omission of kitchen or staircase, in the architect’s original plan.
Michael had rebuilt the house; but the problem of reconciling this cul-de-sac, which seemed to lurk at the end of every turning, with the rest of the design had continued to defeat him. Such failures, however, were his human opportunity; they marked the point where mechanical efficiency yielded to life itself. Here, in this dead-end alley, in a scarcely breathing structure, before the immitigable onslaught of lifeless stone and metal, Life stood at bay. Here she had fled for sanctuary, crouching in this enormous niche like a banished and distraught princess outwitting her pursuers.
Locally, the house was not without admirers. “You can’t call it ostentatious, anyway,” they said. “Nothing flashy about it. That’s saying something, for a fellow as rich as Croesus.” As for his fellow-countrymen, who would have found nothing to impress them, they had as little inkling as poor Michael how American it was in essence.
Better than luxurious marble fittings and ornamental ironwork, it evoked New York—the New York of freak religions, theosophy, Christian Science, the Ku-Klux-Klan; of crazy endowments and eccentric heiresses, of morticians, spiritualist séances, the occult world of Edgar Allan Poe.
It suggested also some sort of waiting-room in a mental hospital; or the stage set for the materialization of departed spirits reporting their demise. The room was not without a hint, besides, of the Jewish-baronial taste for the flamboyant—for that sort of Gothic penthouse chapel, forty storeys up, whose lady inmates pace up and down the nave, burn wax tapers, and play upon the organ. For there is a greater demand for tapers in New York than in Lourdes, or Rome itself, or for that matter any holy city in the world.
This gallery designed for frightened children who, waking, listen to the creaking dark, who dare not traverse certain corridors, this monstrosity, this lumber room was Michael’s sweetness, his vein of poetry, his Achilles’ heel; betraying some quality endemic to his nature, something innate, not borrowed from the children, that was to make him worthy of them both. His fitness, had they known it, for election to the Room, his marriage and his tragic fate, were here prophetically made manifest. Here lay the answer to what had seemed so baffling: Elisabeth had chosen him, not for his fortune or his animal spirits or his well-cut suits, not even for his sex appeal; it was for his death that she had chosen him.
And it was in the nature of things that the children, in ransacking the whole house to find their Room again, should overlook the gallery. Back and forth between their rooms they drifted, like souls in torment. No longer were their nights transparent, a light wraith vanishing at cockcrow, but an unquiet ghost, brooding above them. Having at last achieved their separate rooms, they were determined to hang on to them, and either shut themselves up and sulked, or went shuffling defiantly from one room to another, tight-lipped, with daggers in their eyes.
They knew, half-fearfully, that the gallery was singing to them in a siren voice. They stood on the threshold, hesitating, listening, taking stock.
One of the room’s peculiar properties, and not the least attractive, was its likeness to a ship at anchor, moored by a single cable, swinging freely.
No sooner out of it than one found it quite impossible to locate; back one came, only to find that every other room had shifted its original position. The sole clue, and that a feeble one, was a faint sound of washing-up from the direction of the kitchen.
And all combined to weave a spell, to recall the drowsy magic of old childhood holidays in Swiss hotels when, drunk with the thrill of riding in the ski-lift, one lay relaxed, staring sheer down at the whole world, and at the glacier opposite—a palace made of crystal, so close, so close … (if you were to lean—to stretch your hand out, you could almost touch it).
The hour had struck for Michael to become their guide, to pick up the golden wand, to trace the boundaries and lead them to the destined place.
ONE NIGHT, when Elisabeth’s insistent attempts to prevent Paul from going to sleep had been as usual sulkily resisted, he suddenly jumped up, slammed the door and made a dash for the gallery.
Deficient though he was by nature in powers of observation, he was intensely receptive to emanations, knowing by instinct how to assimilate them and turn them to his purpose.
No sooner folded in these tenebrous vistas, these alternating panels of light and darkness, no sooner trapped amid the litter of this derelict film set, than he became a cat, wary, his every sense alert. His eyes began to glitter. He went padding here and there, stopping, snuffing, not consciously aware of recognition, unable to elucidate the double images—the Cité Monthiers hidden in the room, the floor of snow beneath this midnight silence—but feeling along his nerves the subterranean tremors of a buried life.
He sat down to inspect the study, got up again, dragged some screens over, set them up round his armchair to be his boat, lay down, put his feet up, and bent himself beatifically to the Game. But the bark put out for the dim flood and left him stranded.
He was perturbed. His pride was injured. His vengeance upon Dargelos in the guise of a young girl had been a hopeless flop. He was in thrall to Agatha. And instead of realizing that he loved her, that it was her gentle nature that subdued him, that he should surrender, he reared and plunged in a fierce struggle to shake off this incubus, for so he saw her, avert this evil doom.
To drain the contents of one barrel into another through a length of rubber tubing depends upon one simple operation—the turning of a tap.
Next day Paul started building himself a primitive sort of hut, without a roof, with screens for walls, and settled in. Both in its outer eccentricity and its inner chaos, this curious enclosure seemed integrally designed to fit the unearthly aspect of the room. Paul brought along books, empty boxes, treasure and plaster bust to furnish it. His dirty linen began piling up. The scene was reflected in an enormous mirror. The armchair was replaced by a camp bed. The piece of bunting bestrode the reading lamp.
Elisabeth, Agatha and Gérard began by paying him formal calls; but presently, unable to resist the spell of this upholstered landscape, they migrated in a body on Paul’s heels.
Life began again. They pitched camp. Moonbeams and shadows were their company.
By the end of a week, thermos bottles were doing duty for the Café Charles, and the screens had been extended to form a single room—a desert island in a sea of linoleum.
The sense of discomfort resulting from the separate rooms had caused Paul and Elisabeth to give way to sour ill-humor. Agatha and Gérard attributed the change to the disturbed atmosphere caused by their alien presence. It made them feel unwanted; they drew closer and started going out together. A common ailment formed the immutable basis of their friendship. Agatha worshiped Paul, as Gérard worshiped Elisabeth. They dared not voice their love and suffered it in silence. Lowly they stood before a double altar; Agatha before the youth snow-shrouded, Gérard before the Iron Maiden, lifting eyes of adoration.
Never would it have crossed their minds to aspire to more than a vague benevolence in return. They marveled at the tolerance vouchsafed them, and fearing to presume upon it, or to fail in tact, assiduously withdrew from the charmed circle at every opportunity.
Elisabeth kept forgetting that she had several cars at her disposal. The chauffeur was obliged to jog her memory. One night, when she had gone out for a drive with Gérard and Agatha, leaving Paul locked in his self-chosen dungeon, he
stumbled suddenly upon the truth: he was in love.
His head in a whirl, he had been staring at the photograph, that counterfeit of Agatha, when the discovery felled him like a thunderbolt. The scales dropped from his eyes. He was like one who, after prolonged poring over a monogram, suddenly sees letters stand out clearly in what had formerly seemed mere tracery devoid of meaning.
The screens were hung with all his old trophies from the rue Montmartre, after the manner of an actor’s dressing-room. Instantly, like a Chinese swamp studded with lotus exploding amorously into flower at dawn, the screens unfolded all their many faces. Emerging from multiplicity—here through a gangster’s features, there through an actress’s—the prototype took shape. First glimpsed in Dargelos, pursued through the murk and glimmer of the casual streets, focused on the brittle screens, it crystallized at last in Agatha. How many tentative designs, how many rough sketches for the face of love before the final portrait! He had imagined himself in thrall to an accidental likeness between a schoolboy and a girl; but now he knew with what deliberation Fate first picks its weapon, then lifts it, aims it, finds the heart.
And this time there had been no question of Paul’s secret predilection for a certain type: fate and fate alone had selected Agatha out of the whole world of girls to be Elisabeth’s companion. Who knows?—it may have been in that grim kitchen, by the lethal gas stove, that the knot had first been tied.
Paul marveled at the fact of their encounter; but his sudden clairvoyance was confined to one sole area, that of love. Otherwise a greater marvel might have felled him utterly: namely, Fate the lacemaker implacably at work, holding upon her knees the cushion of our lives, and stuffing it with pins.
Without one solid plank beneath his feet, adrift within his room, Paul dreamed of love. For a time Agatha remained an abstract figure, disembodied; he, isolated in his ecstasy. Looking in the glass, he saw with a shock that all the tension had faded from his face and was ashamed of his past folly and its mask of sullenness. He had wished to return evil for evil. Now, however, evil had become his good. Not one more moment would he waste now before returning good for good. Could he succeed? He was in love; it did not follow that he was loved, or ever would be.
He never dreamed that Agatha could feel a deep respect for him—not only that, he mistook her feeling for aversion. His was a positive emotion, quite unlike that stubborn resistance masquerading as spirited independence that she had hitherto aroused in him. It was a total invasion of his being, a gnawing hunger that could not be appeased. It harried him incessantly, spurred him to take action…. But what action? Never would he dare to tell his love. Besides, there would never be an opportunity. The formal pattern of their Faith, its schisms no less than its shared dogmas, made it well-nigh impossible to conduct a love affair; and so little did their public mode of life allow of private and particular communication, that even were he to bring himself to speak, she might not take him seriously.
A letter seemed the best solution. Fate had flung a pebble, the quiet pool was shaken; now, blindly, he would fling another, let it fall at random. He would drop his letter (special delivery) into the void, to take its chance. It would land secretly at the feet of Agatha, or in full view, and noisily; from one or other of these two alternatives the rest would follow logically.
He would conceal his agitation, pretend to retire for the evening in a fit of sulks, thus saving his face and achieving the necessary privacy for composition.
THE OUTCOME of this stratagem was to exasperate Elisabeth and discourage poor Agatha entirely. She feared that Paul had turned against her and was deliberately avoiding her. Next day, she declared that she was ill, took to her bed and refused to appear for the evening meal.
Elisabeth dined dismally tête-à-tête with Gérard. She then dismissed him, with instructions to get into Paul’s room at all costs, work on him, force him to come clean. She herself, meanwhile, would look after Agatha.
She found her prostrate on her bed, in floods of tears, her head buried in the pillow. Elisabeth was beginning to look haggard. Some unquiet spirit was abroad, still faceless, but she sensed its threat in some unawakened layer of her spirit; some mystery, still nameless, but she could apprehend it. She was beside herself with anxious curiosity. Taking the unhappy creature in her arms, she rocked her on her breast and let her pour her heart out.
“I love him, I adore him,” sobbed Agatha. “He doesn’t care a rap for me.”
So she was in love! … in love, of course, with Gérard. Elisabeth smiled.
“Silly girl,” she said. “What makes you think he doesn’t care a rap for you? Has he told you so? Of course not. Very well then. He doesn’t know his luck, the silly ass! If you want him, you must marry him; he’ll have to marry you.”
Reassured, melted, anesthetized by this undreamed of outcome, by the simplicity of Elisabeth’s acceptance where at best she had expected mockery, Agatha murmured:
“Lise,” her face against this sisterly, this understanding bosom. “You are an angel. But I’m sure he doesn’t love me.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“He couldn’t, not possibly.”
“Gérard’s awfully shy, you know,” went on Elisabeth, still drenched with Agatha’s tears, still rocking and consoling; when all of a sudden Agatha sat bolt upright.
“But … Lise … I didn’t mean Gérard. I meant Paul!”
Elisabeth rose to her feet.
“Forgive me,” stammered Agatha, “please forgive….”
Staring ahead of her, her arms slack along her sides, once more Elisabeth felt herself begin to heel, to founder. As once, before her eyes, her mother had become an unknown woman, dead, anonymous, so now the very mask of treachery confronted her instead of the known, tear-stained face of Agatha. A thief was in the house.
But she must control herself. She must know all. She came and sat down beside the bed.
“Paul! I’m staggered. I’d absolutely no idea….”
In honeyed tones she added:
“Well, how extraordinary! It seems so odd. It’s staggering. Tell me all about it.”
Once more she started to coax and cozen her, hoping to trap her into confidences and bring dark matters flocking to the light.
Agatha dried her eyes, blew her nose; she was only too ready to let herself be lulled once more into security. The floodgates were opened, and Elisabeth became the recipient of more hopes and longings, even, than the love-sick girl had ever dared inwardly avow.
Holding her clasped against her neck and shoulder, Paul’s sister listened to the voice of love, of artless, boundless love. Had she, the speaker, but seen, so close above her, above the automatic hand stroking, stroking her hair, the graven face of adamantine justice, she would have been struck dumb.
Elisabeth stood up, said with a smile:
“Now listen. Just relax, don’t worry. It’s perfectly simple. I’m going to talk to Paul.”
“No, no,” cried Agatha, starting up in terror, “Paul must never guess! For God’s sake, promise me you’ll never breathe a hint….”
“Hush, darling, hush. You’re in love with Paul. If he loves you back, everything’s fine. I won’t give you away, I promise you. I’ll just sound him casually. I’ll soon find out. You know you can trust me; go to sleep now. Don’t budge from your room.”
Elisabeth went down one flight of stairs. She was wearing a bathrobe fastened round the waist by a necktie. It was too long and got in her way. But she was walking, not of her own volition, but as if mechanically controlled, impelled to turn left, turn right, to open doors and close them with precision, without getting the hem of her bathrobe caught in her moving sandals. She felt she had become a robot, wound up to go through certain gestures; unless it went on going through its paces it would fall to pieces. Her heart thudded, heavy, dull, against her ribs, like an axe falling upon wood; there was a singing in her ears; her brain gave back no echo of her brisk forward march. Dreams resound sometimes with footsteps, mindless
, purposeful, like hers; dreams lend us a gait lighter than winged flight, a step able to combine the statue’s weight of inorganic marble with the subaqueous freedom of a deep-sea diver.
Hollow, leaden, buoyant, Elisabeth advanced along the corridor, her white wrap, billowing round her ankles, seeming to float her onward like a cloud, one of those foamy cloud-cushions devised by primitive painters to bear some Being of the angelic order. Only a faint humming persisted in her head, and in her breast nothing any more but an axe thudding out its mortal strokes.
From this time onward she was never to look back. The genius of the Room informed her utterly. She was possessed by it, as men of action—sea-captains, say, or financiers—in moments of supreme emergency may suddenly become possessed and know by inspiration what act, what word, what gesture will save their ships and fortunes from the rocks; or as a criminal, in a blinding flash of intuition, lights on the one, the fool-proof alibi certain to save him from the gallows. Her feet brought her to the bottom of the little staircase leading to the gallery. Gérard appeared in the doorway.
“I was looking for you,” he said. “Paul’s in a very queer mood. He asked me to come and find you. How’s the invalid?”
“She’s got a sick headache; she’s trying to get some sleep and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“I’ll just look in on her.”
“Don’t. She’s got to be kept quiet. Go to my room. Wait there till I come. I’m going to see Paul.”
Secure in the knowledge of Gérard’s unquestioning obedience, Elisabeth dismissed him and advanced into the room. For one moment the old Elisabeth shook off her cerements, took in the counterfeit before her of remembered moonlight, of remembered snow; the gleam of linoleum, the shadow shapes of furniture reflected in its polished surface; and in the center, behind its high, frail barricades, the sacred precincts of the Chinese city.