“Going to ask him for an article?” said Libby, breaking the silence on the wire. Her question startled me. She is smart, and I know that out of her own humiliations, which I regret, she still watches me—it’s not improbable that she’s seen me somewhere with Ruth. But smart as she is, even without that other sad, ciliar intelligence, she was not likely to decode this. “No,” I answered. “No, of course not.” I spoke more brusquely than intended—but we are not able to keep up our flash-bulb sympathies too long. Before I rang off, I asked whether the file gave their London residence. It did. They live in the same house, the same.
“Attention, passengers flight 119.” We take off in forty minutes in another plane which will land at a provincial airport from which transport to London will be provided. London airport is still fogged, as is the city. So we limp home. By plane, couch or dream, the woodcutter’s son returns to the forest once hung with magic faces, the street urchin to his precious black warren still smelling of the rotted fruit of old hungers, to the same acid voices rising with yesterday’s urine from the damp. Haply we think on there.
But the sentimental return has never been enough for me. What I enter for is always the same, inexplicable sensation. The “control that comes from foreknowledge”: I have it. I have the family secrets, ornate, but with their cud of truth, that the older children sometimes played at toss with; I have the old lady’s incessant ranging. Such conversations we had, she and I. And the thousands of conversations intoned back and forth above my head, the lingua franca of giants that now, giant myself, I understand—I have those. I remember what Lady Goodman used to hide in the Battersea box; I remember the day Sir Joseph spoke to her about them. With my name, so fortuitously theirs, in how many ways could I not take my specious place among them? And in the possession of all these things, repeat again the familiar, covert sense that, though I do no evil, I strike the blow. For when one is among people on false terms, then no matter what emotion one gives them, one really gives nothing—and I was never on any but false terms there. Above all, I could keep, intensified by a lifetime between, that sense of the utter secrecy of myself which, as others are held to life by work, love or obsession, holds me. For I have not told. The telegram came just in time. As it does.
For I, who do not dream or if ever do not remember, woke yesterday morning to a certainty. It scuttled away from me, but I caught it just in time, and now that I have it, whether I wake or sleep, it will not let go of me. It is—that like children we cannot believe in our own deaths, at best only anticipating them with the interested horror of the voluptuary, always telling ourselves that there is still something more to come. It is—that the only true death for us is that of the past, and whether these are of hate or of love, this is the death that cannot be borne. It is—that we will not assist at the death of the child we were.
For the past is a doll’s house. It stands there, finished and clear, centered in the attic of the mind. We stand outside it helpless, swollen with the giant present. Inside, where everything is known, charm, joy and terror chime with the limited pangs of clocks. Outside it we stand, we the enormous children, and there is no little bottle from which to drink, or bit of cake that will shrink us in. At its windows the dustless curtains billow perfectly, and below, the pavements sparkle mica-sharp, in the uneclipsable light of a small but steadfast sun.
Why, then, have I used the word “weapon”? The drum—the alien drum. What one cannot enter, one seeks to destroy. I refuse that. And even as I think it, I recognize it. I see them at their window frame and I, my own Doppelgänger, outside it. The listener is not the friend. Pity them, pity him. And deliver them from evil.
Chapter IV. Conversations and Farewells
I SIT IN LONDON, who no longer need to see London. Not far from the Museum, near enough to the Tottenham Court Road station for Dick Whittington to feel his way there with the rest of the crowd or be led there as I was yesterday, this hotel, a small one, almost a pension, is, they tell me, on a street called Store. The fog is lifting now, but yesterday was one of the great fog days I had heard talked of as a boy but had never seen, when buses had to be led like bears on a string, the conductor walking the curb with his hand on the hood, a lantern, and no sign of his red juggernaut a foot beside him, when people lost themselves from door to door, and in the most tightly sealed rooms housewives scrubbed for days later at a thin drapery, sliding to the thumb, that had covered everything. By the time I arrived, two days ago, drawn by a cabby who winked out the moment after his hand, palming the fare, left mine, the yellow, dirtyish astral presence had been rolling over the city for twenty-four hours, making a pickpocket world in which ships rode oyster-still in the estuary, voices on walking sticks tapped the streets under lights which hung a yard from their own corollas, along avenues become a medium’s drawing room. But yesterday, when I visited the Goodmans, I saw all that I needed. I saw the real walk toward me with the authority of the dream.
That night of my arrival I could not sleep, but not from the common dislocation of flight in which the body is transported while the personality lags behind. Contrarily, all the minor episodes, trial visitations of before, seemed to have been crammed into one whose energy had at last disembodied me, floated me on ahead and dropped me here detached—the perfect visitant. The muffled grandeur that confronted me was as frightening as it was perfect too. Greeted by a newsprint Westminster, a Trafalgar Square sunny with fountains or with hoardings flaring in the eternal filmdom of a rainy evening, with all of which I was as familiar as any tourist from Indiana, it might have been otherwise for me—but all my prevision had not anticipated this. Because I actually recalled nothing of the obvious London, that is what I had expected to see. For the city I remembered in every bone was an interior London, a construction between my boyhood and me, arching between. And now instead this interior city, luminous and echoing, came out to meet me as if it were my own camera obscura projected ahead of me, ready for our dialogue.
The effect this had on me wasn’t to have been foreseen. Quietly, quietly, the controls seemed to have been taken from me, in the palest civilian version of what happens in war. For a spell of weather, in this mildly beautiful catastrophe of dark-struck streets, we all had a single story. In a city staged for nemesis, all the drama of self-deception could not hide from me that I was at best the small daily one any man is for somebody; in a city of visitants where murderer and victim, thief and Diogenes, all had the same shadow, what was I but another? So the ordinary and I crept near.
This hotel, once the address of a correspondent of ours who survived the blitz in it, draws its clientele mainly from small-time music hall artistes who gather nightly in its basement restaurant after their turns, to put on the actor’s never-ending show for himself; in the daytime the halls are full of the tap and strain of these devotees at their worship—a rush of grace notes to the telephone, a cockney slap and tickle all in the way of business as a dressing gown slides its way to the bath, and interwoven through all, the steady galop of the long, smiling kangaroo of a girl who brings the morning “cuppa” from nine until noon. That evening, sitting on the bed in my room in the weak, European wattage I had forgotten, I prized every human sound, fancying that their makers too, this evening, cherished them in the same way. “Come down again at eleven, do!” the proprietress had said from behind the cash desk at dinner. “That’s when the fun begins.” But this last night, first, I kept to my ambuscade in the way one spends a quiet, elegiac hour in the house whose furnishings have already been sent on. After eleven, when tags of revel did rise from belowstairs, I could have answered them—aloud if I wished, in this den of rehearsal—with exhilarated tags of my own, for in the extra day it had taken me to reach London, circling the flooded areas by train and charabanc, hearing voices country-thick or those other intonations dear as bouillon, I had remembered more and more, until, still a hundred miles away, I already stood there, in the lost warren I had not hoped to find. I could have rendered them snatch after snatch out of
my treasury with its two pawnshop colors—gold and green, Golder’s Green—in the way men, fingering a school desk on Old Boys’ Day, falter out their Palgrave; But I remained quiet. In the room next mine, some prestidigitator, Svengali of the three-a-days, was practicing his routine. I’d passed him on the way to the w.c., a man with starved cheeks and pointed boots, who looked better able to command the stars than to find his own dinner. Clinks of some apparatus came to me, spurts of falsetto, Stygian growls, and I might have rung my own changes on these also, standing at the transom to declaim murder times three, bending to whisper “Come away, death” at the keyhole. But I remained quiet, with the answer to my letter to Sir Joseph on my knee. If the mood that held me had both epithalamium and knell in it, who was I walking toward, bent on murder, bent on love?—certainly not this old man, neither my father nor a wanted one, living on in the house where, vicarious from the gates of birth, I had been born. His role was at best to be that Merlin who, answering no riddles, might still be able to evoke from me, by powers beyond us both, the nature of the conundrum itself. I had written him from the plane, on a sheet of Lasch stationery over an illegible signature, asking for an appointment without other explanation, and an answer, care of Cross, at this hotel; the mails had been quicker than I. His secretary, writing that Sir Joseph would be returning from Paris on the weekend, suggested that I ring him then at home if my visit was to be short, or at the Museum on Tuesday, since he was never available on a Monday. Both numbers were given; this was a trusting people and a polite one—even if the secretary had taken the liberty of adding the terminal e of gentility to my mother’s name, making it Crosse. In a while, the noises in the next room stopped and I heard its occupant go down, after which I imagined an increase in the genial swell from below. He was luckier than I, this artiste whose terminal e ennobled him no more than mine—he had something to rehearse. Once I went out to the landing, filched one of the heavy volumes of the telephone directory, and brought it all the way back to the room before realizing I did not need it. I sat holding it awhile anyhow, almost regretting the long evening agonies of nonliving which it stood for, having to remind myself that, knowing “where,” being almost there, I no longer needed those sickly nostalgias either; the habit of self-abuse; even of the imagination, dies slow. And once I went to the window, opened it and let the fog roll in, opening my mouth to the sea-taste of the present. Downstairs, they were quiet. Outside, I heard no theme, not even silence, only a confused noise like a coda forever propounding. Tomorrow perhaps, when I went there, it would conclude; tomorrow was Sunday. I would go unannounced, on the day for visits. I would go on the chance.
Next morning, the fog had worsened to complete dark; the air was now a brown smut through which occasional bells came like soundings. Joyce, the Aussie girl who ran about with the breakfasts, volunteered to guide me to the Underground when she heard me in the lounge later on asking for directions—she got off at two. We set off shortly after, coughing and hawking when the air hit our throats, despite which Joyce kept up a comfy chatter, through vowels as warping as the damp. Sye wo’ yer lah-ik, they’d none o’ this in Sydney. ’Ang on now, t’isn’t far. Tall as I, she took my arm without coyness, in the jolly way which kept her easy but not too free with the men still on their pillows in the morning, a good sort of girl from a family of brothers maybe, of a plainness which would have made an American girl miserable but did not mar her blunter national confidence; she knew her own worth. Could tell I was an American; more ’er sort we were; ’otel’s Con-ti-nen-tals were a nahs lot mostly; some of the nytive lot ’ere give ’er a pyne. The air was so queer that the channel of her breath warmed my ear like the currents one comes upon in lake swimming; the lack of traffic gave a sense of empty width traversed; for a stretch a furniture emporium, or several, followed us like the same, continuous room hunting its occupants. Meeting ’er fella at the Astoria Cinema, tyke me stryte on to Golder’s otherwise; been to the ’Ippodrome there once with ’er old auntie in Camden Town. Ask directions at the ticket booth, I should, at a Corner House or the like, some bloke’d show me the wye, sye that for them ’ere. A white squid bulging toward us proved to be a police helmet; any face that bumped us, ruddy from damp or greensick, had the same shy smile on it that I felt on mine; if this was Atlantis, it was snug here. Push on, she said cheerily as a nursemaid, round the cow-ner y’go; ’ere. Her destination was just a few yards down. ’Ere you are, and good luck to you. Shrugging off my thanks, she tightened her tartan head scarf with the first worried look I had seen on her. Ought to go to Camden b’ rahts; thought she’d ask him. No day for the flicks. “Sort of weather the old ones doy on yer,” she said with a shiver; then the permed forelock that made her face even longer waggled jaunty and she was off. A yard away she was gone. Toodle-oo. My arm felt colder without hers. I had a spasm of envy for her fella. Now the last link was gone. Toodle-oo.
Two hours later, I found myself on a street whose conformation, even through the mist, I thought I knew, just as I now was aware, thanks to a half-dozen directives, that the house I wanted was actually nearer to Hendon than to Golder’s, which in the days when my mother first took me there must still have been the end of the Underground line. In later years—I could vaguely recall now—our walk had been shorter, along a different approach. But memory, with a fierce fidelity to its earliest counters, to the particolored name with its garden district smells for the boy from Fulham, the maying-in-November sound of the special night on which he had been born, had stubbornly cherished its mistake. There would be others. Such a set piece of the sentiments as Miss Pridden’s might remain as it was—not one of us but kept in his cupboard some such antique barcarole—but what lay ahead of me was a more primary cluster. What did I want of it, then, out of that secret cache-pot where the first savageries are confined? I already knew from the Mannixes what it was in itself, apart from me—a cage swung on the strings of its own frailties, organism subject to all the pity the animate can summon for the animate, a live house. Calm yourself, said the elements; calm—we will float you there; swing with the tide. I stopped, felt my way inward from the curb, stooped, warned of a mass by its air displacement as the blind are, and put my hand out—a stone pillar. The fog swirled against my flash. A match, held close, did better. What I touched was a lion’s head with a ring in its jaws that dripped fog-tears. Once it had been above my own head. I was two doors down. And here you are. Good luck to you.
The side window held me. The house, made of a brick almost the color of the brown dark, bulked just visible in it, of no shape except comfort’s, never a house with a silhouette, only one with a core. It was the window that held, drawing me across a yard of fog that was ocean and years both—a projection-room screen which would be nothing but shadow and canvas if I grasped it—but it held.
The high casement was sealed against the drip, but inside the draperies had been drawn back and a lamp, set on the window seat as if for wayfarers, shone out with a strong yellow gleam. From any distance, the fog baffled the lamp, but if one stood to one side, close against the shutter, one could see in. This was the morning room, side room for the dispensing of benefits, downstairs nursery on rainy days for the older ones, at whose window Martin had mooned over his marbles, to whose games I had sometimes been summoned from the sewing room, at whose doorway, tranced from my backstairs errands, I had sometimes watched. What colors I could see were not the same and long faded; the same fire burned in the grate. Fire and rain had continued, and over there was the old wooden hutch in which they had kept the games. Near it, on a small desk, once gilt, almost child-size, that I had forgotten, a man’s dark coat sleeve rested. To see whose it was I would have to step down into the well for a cellar window centered just below the casement. I stepped down. Through the drops sliding along my hat brim, the man’s arm was directly in my line of vision on a level just above the sill, its hand rested on the desk while he spoke into the telephone. His back was turned to me, head bent toward the instrument, his words inau
dible, but the hand lay under the light in close-up, firming itself with the restless constant of the aged, now clenching, now splayed. Its veins were ropes now, under mushroom skin heavily spotted, and the curled, black mat of hair which would once have been on the level of a boy’s eyes was now either whitened or shed, but those long sinews, the fingers still sallowed with tobacco, could only be, in this house, the same. I remembered the scholar’s pencil glinting in them, writing in its precise script: The pig said “Oui.” I remembered how the strong, black hairs seemed to curl and tremble of themselves the day I came upon the two of them, the day I stood behind him, quiet with the bastings, and heard him ask her where she had got what was in the Battersea box he was holding, the day I heard him speak to her about the cachets.
The man inside there finished talking, put down the phone, rose, the hand aiding him, and turned; he was coming toward me, but I had the advantage and was up and away before his shadow intercepted the lamp. While I watched, flattened against the side of the house, the shadow stayed there, waiting for someone perhaps, or just looking out. It could not have seen me. But from that moment, all that I was to do in that house came to me as natural and unpremeditated as if that hand had pressed a fount long dry or never freshened, and that shadow, waiting there, long expectant, had seen. When I made a circuit of the house my feet moved surely over the lawn that sucked them, wet flagstone and lawn again, as if they had played at hare-and-hounds here yesterday. I had the advantage over him of youth and memory, my dram’s worth of the power only a little less temporary than his, which would be taken from us both in the way that I had seen it wrested from my mother, but I no longer wanted it—any more than I wanted my mother to sit up in her grave to show me, huddled still between her poor bones, my paring, or needed the old monologuist his mother, long since gone to hers with all their rich rubric around her, to read me, from the chance bit of mine she may have harbored, what I had gone down on my knees to beg her that last day. Let her harbor it still, if she had ever had it; let them both. It was the simplest, most impossible question in the world I had asked her, one to which at the end everyone had his answer. I walked up the front path as the real walks toward the dream.
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