The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  From his face only one would have guessed, and guessed wrongly, that his preferences were for billiard-rooms and music-halls. His conversation showed them to be otherwise. It was of Polytechnic classes that he spoke, and of the course of lectures in English liter­ature that had just begun. And, as if somebody had asserted that the pursuit of such studies was not compatible with a certain measure of physical development also, he announced that he was not sure that he should not devote, say, half an evening a week, on Wednesdays, to training in the gymnasium.

  ‘Mens sana in corpore sano, Bessie,’ he said; ‘a sound mind in a sound body, you know. That’s tremendously important, especially when a fellow spends the day in a stuffy office. Yes, I think I shall give it half Wednesdays, from eight-thirty to nine-thirty; sends you home in a glow. But I was going to tell you about the Literature Class. The second lecture’s tonight. The first was splendid, all about the languages of Europe and Asia – what they call the Indo-Germanic languages, you know. Aryans. I can’t tell you exactly without my notes, but the Hindoos and Persians, I think it was, they crossed the Himalaya Mountains and spread westward some­how, as far as Europe. That was the way it all began. It was splendid, the way the lecturer put it. English is a Germanic language, you know. Then came the Celts. I wish I’d brought my notes. I see you’ve been reading; let’s look –’

  A book lay on her knees, its back warped by the heat of the fire. He took it and opened it.

  ‘Ah, Keats! Glad you like Keats, Bessie. We needn’t be great readers, but it’s important that what we do read should be all right. I don’t know him, not really know him, that is. But he’s quite all right – A1 in fact. And he’s an example of what I’ve always main­tained, that know­ledge should be brought within the reach of all. It just shows. He was the son of a livery-stable keeper, you know, so what he’d have been if he’d really had chances, been to universities and so on, there’s no knowing. But, of course, it’s more from the historical standpoint that I’m studying these things. Let’s have a look –’

  He opened the book where a hairpin between the leaves marked a place. The firelight glowed on the page, and he read, monotonously and inelastically.

  And as I sat, over the light blue hills

  There came a noise of revellers; the rills

  Into the wide stream came of purple hue –

  ’Twas Bacchus and his crew!

  The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills

  From kissing cymbals made a merry din –

  ’Twas Bacchus and his kin!

  Like to a moving vintage down they came,

  Crowned with green leaves, and faces all on flame

  All madly dancing through the pleasant valley

  To scare thee, Melancholy!

  It was the wondrous passage from Endymion, of the descent of the wild inspired rabble into India. Ed plucked for a moment at his lower lip, and then, with a ‘Hm! What’s it all about, Bessie?’ continued.

  Within his car, aloft, young Bacchus stood,

  Trifling his ivy-dart, in dancing mood,

  With sidelong laughing;

  And little rills of crimson wine imbrued

  His plump white arms and shoulders, enough white

  For Venus’ pearly bite;

  And near him rode Silenus on his ass,

  Pelted with flowers as he on did pass,

  Tipsily quaffing.

  ‘Hm! I see. Mythology. That’s made up of tales, and myths, you know. Like Odin and Thor and those, only those were Scandi­navian Mythology. So it would be absurd to take it too seriously. But I think, in a way, things like that do harm. You see,’ he ex­plained, ‘the more beautiful they are the more harm they might do. We ought always to show virtue and vice in their true colours, and if you look at it from that point of view this is just drunkenness. That’s rotten; destroys your body and intellect; as I heard a chap say once, it’s an insult to the beasts to call it beastly. I joined the Blue Ribbon when I was fourteen and I haven’t been sorry for it yet. No. Now there’s Vedder; he “went off on a bend”, as he calls it, last night, and even he says this morning it wasn’t worth it. But let’s read on.’

  Again he read, with unresilient movement.

  I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown

  Before the vine-wreath crown!

  I saw parched Abyssinia rouse and sing

  To the silver cymbals’ ring!

  I saw the whelming vintage hotly pierce

  Old Tartary the fierce! . . .

  Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans.

  ‘Hm! He was a Buddhist god, Brahma was; mythology again. As I say, if you take it seriously, it’s just glorifying intoxication. – But I say; I can hardly see. Better light the lamp. We’ll have tea first, then read. No, you sit still; I’ll get it ready; I know where things are –’

  He rose, crossed to a little cupboard with a sink in it, filled the kettle at the tap, and brought it to the fire. Then he struck a match and lighted the lamp.

  The cheap glass shade was of a foolish corolla shape, clear glass below, shading to pink, and deepening to red at the crimped edge. It gave a false warmth to the spaces of the room above the level of the mantelpiece, and Ed’s figure, as he turned the regulator, looked from the waist upwards as if he stood within that portion of a spectrum screen that deepens to the band of red. The bright con­centric circles that spread in rings of red on the ceiling were more dimly reduplicated in the old mirror over the mantelpiece; and the wintry eastern light beyond the chimney-hoods seemed suddenly almost to die out.

  Bessie, her white neck below the level of the lamp-shade, had taken up the book again; but she was not reading. She was looking over it at the upper part of the grate. Presently she spoke. ‘I was looking at some of those things this afternoon, at the Museum.’

  He was clearing from the table more buckram linings and patterns of paper, numbers of Myra’s Journal and The Delineator. Already on his way to the cupboard he had put aside a red-bodiced dressmaker’s ‘shape’ of wood and wire. ‘What things?’ he asked.

  ‘Those you were reading about. Greek, aren’t they?’

  ‘Oh, the Greek room! . . . But those people, Bacchus and those, weren’t people in the ordinary sense. Gods and goddesses, most of ’em; Bacchus was a god. That’s what mythology means. I wish some­times our course took in Greek literature, but it’s a dead language after all. German’s more good in modern life. It would be nice to know everything, but one has to select, you know. Hallo, I clean forgot; I brought you some grapes, Bessie; here they are, in this bag; we’ll have ’em after tea, what?’

  ‘But,’ she said again after a pause, still looking at the grate, ‘they had their priests and priestesses, and followers and people, hadn’t they? It was their things I was looking at – combs and brooches and hairpins, and things to cut their nails with. They’re all in a glass case there. And they had safety-pins, exactly like ours.’

  ‘Oh, they were a civilised people,’ said Ed cheerfully. ‘It all gives you an idea. I only hope you didn’t tire yourself out. You’ll soon be all right, of course, but you have to be careful yet. We’ll have a clean tablecloth, shall we?’

  She had been seriously ill; her life had been despaired of; and somehow the young Polytechnic student seemed anxious to assure her that she was now all right again, or soon would be. They were to be married ‘as soon as things brightened up a bit’, and he was very much in love with her. He watched her head and neck as he con­tinued to lay the table, and then, as he crossed once more to the cupboard, he put his hand lightly in passing on her hair.

  She gave so quick a start that he too started. She must have been very deep in her reverie to have been so taken by surprise.

  ‘I say, Bessie, don’t jump like that!’ he cried with involuntary quick­ness. Indeed, had his hand been red-ho
t, or ice-cold, or taloned, she could not have turned a more startled, even frightened, face to him.

  ‘It was your touching me,’ she muttered, resuming her gazing into the grate.

  He stood looking anxiously down on her. It would have been better not to discuss her state, and he knew it; but in his anxiety he forgot it.

  ‘That jumpiness is the effect of your illness, you know. I shall be glad when it’s all over. It’s made you so odd.’

  She was not pleased that he should speak of her ‘oddness’. For that matter, she, too, found him ‘odd’ – at any rate, found it difficult to realise that he was as he always had been. He had begun to irritate her a little. His club-footed reading of the verses had irritated her, and she had tried hard to hide from him that his cocksure opinions and the tone in which they were pronounced jarred on her. It was not that she was ‘better’ than he, ‘knew’ any more than he did, didn’t (she supposed) love him still the same; these moods, that dated from her illness, had nothing to do with those things; she reproached herself sometimes that she was subject to such doldrums.

  ‘It’s all right, Ed, but please don’t touch me just now,’ she said.

  He was in the act of leaning over her chair, but he saw her shrink, and refrained.

  ‘Poor old girl!’ he said sympathetically. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s awfully stupid of me to be like this, but I can’t help it. I shall be better soon if you leave me alone.’

  ‘Nothing’s happened, has it?’

  ‘Only those silly dreams I told you about.’

  ‘Bother the dreams!’ muttered the Polytechnic student.

  During her illness she had had dreams, and had come to herself at intervals to find Ed or the doctor, Mrs Hepburn or her aunt, bending over her. These kind, solicitous faces had been no more than a glimpse, and then she had gone off into the dreams again. The curious thing had been that the dreams had seemed to be her vivid waking life, and the other things – the anxious faces, the details of her dingy bedroom, the thermometer under her tongue – had been the dream. And, though she had come back to actuality, the dreams had never quite vanished. She could remember no more of them than that they had seemed to hold a high singing and jocundity, issuing from some region of haze and golden light; and they seemed to hover, ever on the point of being recaptured, yet ever eluding all her mental efforts. She was living now between reality and a vision.

  She had fewer words than sensations, and it was a little pitiful to hear her vainly striving to make clear what she meant.

  ‘It’s so queer,’ she said. ‘It’s like being on the edge of something – a sort of tiptoe – I can’t describe it. Sometimes I could almost touch it with my hand, and then it goes away, but never quite away. It’s like something just past the corner of my eye, over my shoulder, and I sit very still sometimes, trying to take it off its guard. But the moment I move my head it moves too – like this –’

  Again he gave a quick start at the suddenness of her action. Very stealthily her faunish eyes had stolen sideways, and then she had swiftly turned her head.

  ‘Here, I say, don’t, Bessie!’ he cried nervously. ‘You look awfully uncanny when you do that! You’re brooding,’ he continued, ‘that’s what you’re doing, brooding. You’re getting into a low state. You want bucking up. I don’t think I shall go to the Polytec. tonight; I shall stay and cheer you up. You know, I really don’t think you’re making an effort, darling.’

  His last words seemed to strike her. They seemed to fit in with something of which she too was conscious. ‘Not making an effort . . . ’ she wondered how he knew that. She felt in some vague way that it was important that she should make an effort.

  For, while her dream ever evaded her, and yet never ceased to call her with such a voice as he who reads on a magic page of the calling of elves hears stilly in his brain, yet somehow behind the seduction was another and a sterner voice. There was warning as well as fascin­ation. Beyond that edge at which she strained on tiptoe, mingled with the jocund calls to Hasten, Hasten, were deeper calls that bade her Beware. They puzzled her. Beware of what? Of what danger? And to whom? . . .

  ‘How do you mean, I’m not making an effort, Ed?’ she asked slowly, again looking into the fire, where the kettle now made a gnat-like singing.

  ‘Why, an effort to get all right again. To be as you used to be – as, of course, you will be soon.’

  ‘As I used to be?’ The words came with a little check in her breathing.

  ‘Yes, before all this. To be yourself, you know.’

  ‘Myself?’

  ‘All jolly, and without these jerks and jumps. I wish you could get away. A fortnight by the sea would do you all the good in the world.’

  She knew not what it was in the words ‘the sea’ that caused her suddenly to breathe more deeply. The sea! . . . It was as if, by the mere uttering of them, he had touched some secret spring, brought to fulfilment some spell. What had he meant by speaking of the sea? . . . A fortnight before, had somebody spoken to her of the sea it would have been the sea of Margate, of Brighton, of Southend, that, supplying the image that a word calls up as if by conjuration, she would have seen before her; and what other image could she supply, could she possibly supply, now? . . . Yet she did, or almost did, supply one. What new experience had she had, or what old, old one had been released in her? With that confused, joyous dinning just beyond the range of physical hearing there had suddenly mingled a new illusion of sound – a vague, vast pash and rustle, silky and harsh both at once, its tireless voice holding meanings of stillness and solitude compared with which the silence that is mere absence of sound was vacancy. It was part of her dream, invisible, intangible, inaudible, yet there. As if he had been an enchanter, it had come into being at the word upon his lips. Had he other such words? Had he the Master Word that – (ah, she knew what the Master Word would do!) – would make the Vision the Reality and the Reality the Vision? Deep within her she felt something – her soul, herself, she knew not what – thrill and turn over and settle again . . .

  ‘The sea,’ she repeated in a low voice.

  ‘Yes, that’s what you want to set you up – rather! Do you remember that fortnight at Littlehampton, you and me and your Aunt? Jolly that was! I like Littlehampton. It isn’t flash like Brighton, and Margate’s always so beastly crowded. And do you remember that afternoon by the windmill? I did love you that afternoon, Bessie!’ . . .

  He continued to talk, but she was not listening. She was wondering why the words ‘the sea’ were somehow part of it all – the pins and brooches of the Museum, the book on her knees, the dream. She remembered a game of hide-and-seek she had played as a child, in which cries of ‘Warm, warm, warmer!’ had announced the approach to the hidden object. Oh, she was getting warm – positively hot . . .

  He had ceased to talk, and was watching her. Perhaps it was the thought of how he had loved her that afternoon by the windmill that had brought him close to her chair again. She was aware of his nearness, and closed her eyes for a moment as if she dreaded some­thing. Then she said quickly, ‘Is tea nearly ready, Ed?’ and, as he turned to the table, took up the book again.

  She felt that even to touch that book brought her ‘warmer’. It fell open at a page. She did not hear the clatter Ed made at the table, nor yet the babble his words had evoked, of the pierrots and banjos and minstrels of Margate and Littlehampton. It was to hear a gladder, wilder tumult that she sat once more so still, so achingly listening . . .

  The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills

  From kissing cymbals made a merry din –

  The words seemed to move on the page. In her eyes another light than the firelight seemed to play. Her breast rose, and in her thick white throat a little inarticulate sound twanged.

  ‘Eh? Did you speak, Bessie?’ Ed asked, stopping in his b
uttering of bread.

  ‘Eh? . . . No.’

  In answering, her head had turned for a moment, and she had seen him. Suddenly it struck her with force: what a shaving of a man he was! Desk-chested, weak-necked, conscious of his little ‘important’ lip and chin – yes, he needed a Polytechnic gymnastic course! Then she remarked how once, at Margate, she had seen him in the distance, as in a hired baggy bathing-dress he had bathed from a machine, in muddy water, one of a hundred others, all rather cold, flinging a polo ball about and shouting stridently. ‘A sound mind in a sound body!’ . . . He was rather vain of his neat shoes, too, and doubtless stunted his feet; and she had seen the little spot on his neck caused by the chafing of his collar-stud . . . No, she did not want him to touch her, just now at any rate. His touch would be too like a betrayal of another touch . . . somewhere, sometime, somehow . . . in that tantalising dream that refused to allow itself either to be fully remembered or quite for­gotten. What was that dream? What was it? . . .

  She continued to gaze into the fire.

  Of a sudden she sprang to her feet with a choked cry of almost animal fury. The fool had touched her. Carried away doubtless by the memory of that afternoon by the windmill, he had, in passing once more to the kettle, crept softly behind her and put a swift burning kiss on the side of her neck.

  Then he had retreated before her, stumbling against the table and causing the cups and saucers to jingle.