Not the incomparable Moet & Chandon Dom Perignon Cuvée of 1921; or the great Lanson of that same year; or the magnificent Moet & Chandon Imperial Crown English Market. Not even one of the 1928s; such as a Perrier Jouet, or a Pommery & Greno, or a Bollinger, or a Krug, or an Ernest Irroy, or a Pol Roger, or a Clicquot Dry England, or a Heidsieck Monopole.
Don’t worry, folks, there’s plenty more where that came from, could be magnums, could be jeroboams. The fashionable wedding breakfast’s overflowing with gold-necked bottles in coolers, with orchids and caviare and diamonds and pearls and the creations of the most exclusive-expensive couturiers and the perfumes of a royal prince. Don’t ask awkward questions, comrades. Don’t bring all that up again now. We’ve got to increase the population somehow, haven’t we? Otherwise how are we going to keep on fighting everyone everywhere all the time?
Under striped awnings the wedding guests depart; in cars, in bars, they re-shuffle, re-sort themselves for the night. The old act is on: Boy meets Girl, at smoky parties, in public conveyances, in the best hotels, in the lowest boozers, in suburban parlours, on park benches, under viaducts. And steady trains of midgets march behind.
Off comes the paper again. And now the artist seems to be impatient. It isn’t enough just to rip off the sheet and leave it wherever it happens to fall. This time he has to tear it into very small pieces, crumple the scraps in his hand, and throw them peevishly into the grate along with the cigarette ends and the empty cigarette packets, the spent matches, the paint rags, the flattened and finished tubes. Perhaps he’s a trifle hung-over this morning. Perhaps the breakfast coffee wasn’t strong enough; perhaps he really needed a couple of doubles to start the day with; perhaps there were too many bills in the morning mail; perhaps his wife walked out on him yesterday; perhaps he’s just happened to catch the eternally calm clear eye of one of the Heaven-Born. Or perhaps it’s one of a million other possible trials which accounts for the dissatisfaction he feels with his own efforts.
After all, they do these things much better on the moving pictures. So let’s turn to the dream screen, which displays simultaneously three superimposed themes.
The most remote of these presumably should be the one used as background, very frail, very underemphasized, ranks of uniformed figures marching on a diagonal slant from upper right to lower left. These figures are exactly similar, featureless, diminutive, uncoloured, like the outline drawings used in demonstrating statistics. The ranks are evenly spaced, extending across the whole screen; they march throughout at a regular medium pace, raising their legs in a modified goose-step. The effect on the eye of this transient army is no more disturbing than a background of falling snow or continuous heavy rain. The background does not fade or solidify: it is not modified in any way by the development of the other two themes; nor is it ever extinguished by them.
Against the basic motif, moving roughly horizontally, but in a fluid, swerving, weaving band, a stream of dancers, men and women in couples, appearing small at left, gradually enlarging centre (certain couples enormously), diminishing again as they move towards right. As the dancers individualize they are seen to be of all ages, classes and nationalities, stepping their various rhythms to a jumble of distant dance tunes further confused with intermittent far-off blaring of martial music. No face remains prominent long enough for complete apperception, but continually changing details emerge. A schoolboy in Eton jacket partnering a heavy fly-blown woman of fifty with bull-neck and sparse blue marcelled hair. A hard, judge-like man of about sixty-five, personifying the more hidebound and sadistic type of disciplinarian, woodenly placing his feet in bright patent leather shoes. Simpering over his stiffly encircling arm, a horribly travestied sweet young girl of sixteen in perfectly transparent white muslin; the rouged points of her breasts stand out through the white like the red spot on a tarantula. A poet-like, precious young intellectual, spectacled, wearing a silk shirt and otherwise a baby’s napkin, is dancing with a big black negress whose far-too-tight satin dress is bursting at every seam. His twin brother, identical except that his face is redder and that he wears an eyeshade instead of glasses: in his case a striped and monogrammed blazer goes with the napkin. His partner a Peter Amo blonde with the usual trimmings. A dear old lady in white fichu and cap; her swollen ankles teeter dangerously over three-inch-pinpoint heels studded with brilliants. An overalled surgeon, sinisterly grotesque with his gauze mask and rubber gloves. A yellow gentleman flashing yellow diamonds. A bus-driver in uniform. A very dignified, polished, bearded member of the Académie Française attired in full tenue de soir with the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole. Fliers, bellboys, witch-doctors, scientists, typists, waiters, beauty queens, parsons, racing cyclists, whores, sandwichmen, cooks, schoolmasters, prize-fighters, Chinamen, kings. These people can be rearranged indefinitely to include any combination, as they waltz or shuffle or glide or rumba or tango or walk or whirl or whatever across the screen.
The third theme has as its accompaniment sentimental song-hits of the most saccharine variety, which fragmentarily make themselves heard cross-jangling the other tunes. Equating pictorially, numerous quick flashes flicking about the screen with glimpses of conventional love scenes in gardens, conservatories; a girl and boy on a staircase embracing; an enlaced couple leaning over a steamer rail and watching the moon rise (moon is searchlight); mouths searching, clinging; hands (male and female) fumbling, stroking, clutching, questing, trembling, gripping other hands, bodies, slipping straps from shoulders, unfastening buttons; shot, from above, of a man and girl in bathing-suits pressed together in a tight clinch on a beach; close-up of the girl’s upturned, imbecilic, nympholeptic face. Various erotic flashes, in boats, cars, bedrooms, parks, dance-halls, etc. None of the shots, which break out at random all over the screen, lasts for more than a second. The effect is rather that of looking at a high building in various parts of which windows are lit up one after another as lights are switched on and off in the different rooms.
Music increases to utmost confusion of dance bands, military bands, crooners, as something whitish, roundish, rises from centre base and slowly travels straight up like a balloon, like a bubble, traversing the whole height of the screen. Maybe it’s an igloo; maybe it’s an egg. Up it goes, steady and sedate, and inside it B is sitting cross-legged, reading a book. Just as the bubble, the balloon, the igloo, the egg, or whatever it may be, reaches the top of the screen it explodes quietly with a smothered genteel belch.
The bubble-plop signals disruption of the combined themes. The dancers and lovers blow madly in all directions; fly apart; disintegrate: they and the music vanish together.
The ranked figures continue their unassertive march for a few seconds, until it becomes clear that they are quite young boys in some sort of uniform, Boy Scouts perhaps, or members of some other youth organization.
The troop of about twenty boys marches along a dusty road in full summer sun. The marching is not at all smart, several boys are out of step and others have broken rank and are lagging behind. They are all hot and tired and quite considerably bored. One who has a blistered heel scuffs along barefoot with his shoes in his hand.
At right, parallel to the road, from which it is separated by a wire fence bearing No Trespassing notices, a cool, shimmering lake with flowering flags growing to the edge of the water. A freshly painted row-boat is moored to a miniature jetty. Opposite this the march falters, breaks down completely, the boys straggle up to the fence, bunch together there like young cattle, eyes focused enviously on the boat and the water. Simultaneously with the break up of the march, from behind some willows on the other side of the fence, two smiling girls (one is unmistakably B—could the other be A in her younger days? It’s impossible to tell really, they’re so much alike) appear on the sunlit slope. Smiling into one another’s faces, oblivious, selfcontained, they walk hand-in-hand to the jetty, unfasten the boat, get in and row out and away, towards the centre of the lake.
From the level of the boys’ eyes, through
the thick wire mesh, as if looking into a cage, the boat shown withdrawing swiftly, with extreme effect of solitariness, inaccessibility; diminishing into a toy, a waterbird, a floating leaf in the distance; vanishing.
OUT of my urgent need I found the way of working a new night magic. Out of the night-time magic I built in my head a small room as a sanctuary from the day. Phantoms might be my guests there, but no human could enter. Human beings were dangerous to me, like tigers prowling at large in the daytime world. Inside my secluded room I felt safe from the tigers I sometimes envied. Sometimes a savage beauty lured me into the sun and I would start to love the danger a little. On these occasions I felt the reluctant love drained painfully from me as blood drains from a deep wound. The tigers lapped my love’s blood and remained enemies. The inhabitants of the day laughed at the gift I wanted to bring them, and I shut myself in my inner room to escape the betrayal of their arrogant mouths.
SOMEONE IS running madly up and down stairs. What devilish torment can hunt the poor fellow like this? No sooner does he reach the foot of the staircase (it’s short, mercifully, but quite steep), than he turns and is off to the top as fast as he can go. Then down he rushes at once, almost tripping over his own feet in his crazy haste to get to the bottom and start climbing again.
So he keeps on, up and down, up and down, up and down, like a caged squirrel or a mouse caught in a treadmill. Such agitation is horribly painful to watch. One holds one’s breath in suspense, waiting for him to fall badly and break an arm or a leg: or else his heart must surely give out and he will have a collapse of that kind. Already he’s worn to a shadow, a wraith, whose features are too ghostly to be recognizable.
Each moment he grows more shadowy, more transparent. He’s getting smaller and smaller too, as the altering dream perspective banishes him to the distance where, finally, his frantic restlessness is no more disturbing than the activity of a spider within its web.
Are these clouds or mountains which now blossom like huge flowers in the glowing light of the sky? They might even be figures, solemn supernatural beings, archangels or gods, with faces masked in their own radiance. Light steadily fills the whole dream until there’s no room for anything else. Even the dis-embodied voice of the Liaison Officer can barely squeeze itself in, so that only fragments are heard of the lines he is reading about
the Blessed Genii who walk above in the light, gazing with blissful eyes of still, eternal clearness
The perennially clear eye of the Heaven-Born opens to a stare of shockingly bright moonlight. The eye is located at presumptive God height so that the terrestrial globe is seen as if from an airplane cruising over it at about three thousand feet.
A cold, steady review of night, moonlight, vastness, emptiness, loneliness, desolation, by the celestial eye. The bleak and enormous reaches of its vision swoop occasionally to focus detail at close range but never linger on anything. The eye is checking a record of silence, space; a nightmare, every horror of this world in its frigid and blank neutrality. The actual scope of its orbit depends on the individual concept of desolation, but approximate symbols are suggested in long roving perspectives of ocean, black swelled, in slow undulation, each whaleback swell plated in armour-hard brilliance with the moonlight clanking along it; the endless, aimless, nameless shoreline, flat, bald-white sand, unbroken black-tree palisade; the heavy and horrid eternal onrush of breakers sullenly exploding their madness of futile power, millions of mad tons piling, booming, collapsing, swirling in chain-mail mosaic of mad moon splinters; blanched mountain range a ridge of clenched knucklebones.
The eye sinks slowly to travel at tree height past clattering black slats of palm leaves knife-edged on steel;
and looks at a hideous fanged stone idol in front of which lies a hyena, gnawing away at a lump of half-rotted flesh; dips lower to inspect three strung human skulls dully ululating in wind; rises again to medium altitude and directs its impassive scrutiny towards death-white ice-caps; towards hopeless vastness of dreary continents crawling with pestilential rivers, scabbed with plains in the comers of which perpetual dust-storms are festering; towards blasted battlefields and ruined cities running with seared putrescence; over dead village roofs and poisoned gardens, broken walls bitter in snow or moon, blank windows black with nothing.
And so on, in regular and perfectly unflinching survey
which non-dimensional B from deep within its pupil coincidently shares
until a fresh manifestation gathers itself together, and focuses interest on:
the castle the sun
The sun is, in fact, just on the point of rising over the town. This is the precise moment when Day and Night are balanced before exchanging their spheres of influence. Low in the left segment of sky the full moon still shines white on steep gables and eaves, and glazes window panes behind which people are still fast asleep in their beds.
People are in bed too in the houses at the opposite end of the town where a faint preliminary pink is spreading fanwise out of the east. But it’s noticeable that the sleepers here are restlessly stirring, already beginning to break away from their dreams. The moon retires with graceful prudence, her blue train trailing behind, switching slickly over the horizon before the roguish rosy-fingered retinue has time to twitch at it. Up swaggers his majesty in the spotlight, adjusting the gilded curls of his peruke, tossing his daily largesse with elegant gestures of careless munificence, flicking the golden flakes from his laces like snuff.
As the first gold strikes the weathercock on the castle tower the sleepers waken, throw off the bedcovers, jump into their clothes. All in an instant the life of the morning’s begun: white smoke puffs briskly out of the chimneys beside which storks are tidying up their nests; eggs and bacon sizzle in frying pans; steaming coffee pours into over-sized flower-patterned cups; the cheerful clatter of breakfast things all over the town is punctuated by the double knocks of postmen going their rounds. In next to no time all these things happen: and then the school bells start ringing, children with satchels and apples come tumbling and chattering out of the many doors, crowding the narrow streets which are crowded already with people going to work, with market carts, with street-sellers putting up stalls, washerwomen carrying bundles of linen, dogs pulling handcarts, priests hurrying along with rosaries or small black books in their hands. The day’s well established before you can turn round. And now all the workers are busily employed: a drone of voices comes from the schoolhouse windows; housewives are knowingly prodding the provisions set out in the market or haggling with stallholders; in steamy washhouses, women up to their elbows in suds shout jokingly or crossly to one another; the dogs are panting in the shade of their little carts at the end of their task; the priests are closeted and anonymous in solemn confessionals.
From high up in the castle dominating the town B watches these activities somewhat dubiously. There’s a section of flat roof which forms a sort of terrace between two turrets, and it’s here that she’s standing looking over the parapet beside a clawed gargoyle which has melancholy human eyes in its pig’s face. It seems to be a whimsical, jolly, busy, toyshop scene that she’s looking at: except that, like all horror-dream backgrounds, it’s a bit too harmless to be truly disarming. It’s very innocence gives it away. Such emphatic innocuousness is bound to contain a submerged threat. The threat never comes completely into the open, but is concealed in isolated glimpses and incidents, trivial in themselves, yet generating a growing sense of tension, anxiety, apprehension.
For instance:
An open window behind which, in the shadowed room, indeterminate worrying movements are faintly discernible; a hand suddenly comes out, grabs the window shut and snaps down the blind.
In a small public garden, watched by a few idlers, men with besoms and long-handled rakes are making a bonfire of leaves; and this is only remarkable because it’s summertime and the leaves haven’t started to fall yet.
A neatly dressed man with a bag in his hand is hurrying along the street to the st
ation. His arrival is timed very well as the smoke of the train can be seen in the distance just as he gets to the booking office. But then, instead of buying a ticket, he suddenly walks out of the station again, takes a piece of chalk out of his pocket, marks something on the door of one of the neighbouring houses, and hurries off in quite another direction.
B isn’t looking out for incidents of this sort: in fact, she’s hardly aware of having observed them at all, being consciously preoccupied with the general pattern of which they are only insignificant details. Nevertheless, she is influenced by them without knowing it, they are responsible for the vaguely disturbing background of uncertainty in her mind.
Presently there’s a new sound, a noise of cheers and clapping, approaching the castle. A famous ballerina is driving through the town in her open carriage, the people in the streets recognize her and acclaim her as she goes by. B leans over the parapet to look. She has an excellent view, the carriage is driving right up to the castle entrance. It’s a fine carriage, polished like jet. The horses are beautiful, glossy, spirited creatures. They slow down as the coachman tightens the reins. Yes, they are actually stopping just below the place where B stands. A flock of pigeons which has been circling around the turret simultaneously alights in the street. As if for some prearranged purpose, the birds assemble all round the carriage and the prancing horses.
The fair-haired ballerina looks up and waves her hand. Come down here, she is calling to B. Come for a drive in my carriage and I’ll show you the town. Her voice carries like the sound of a bell.