The Ballet of Dr Caligari

by Reggie Oliver

  I was to the world unconscious, but I continued to be conscious in some other way that I cannot fully explain, except to say it was not a dream. Dreams are wayward, drugged, uncertain affairs, but this was not. It was clear and sharp and crystalline, more real, in fact than any reality I have encountered before or since.

  After feeling a heavy blow on the back of my neck the next thing I remembered was a surprise that all was now well. I was back in a dressing room at the Theatre Royal, or, at least, a dressing room very like one I had been in there. I was seated at a dressing table, before a mirror surrounded by bright bulbs.

  I looked into the mirror and adjusted my make-up with a little brush. It was never going to be perfect, but it would do. My costume was magnificent, though: one I had always dreamed of. It was of tight fitting black velvet encrusted with sequins and paste diamonds—tastefully though—and it made the best of my slightly stocky figure. It did not worry me that this was not the costume I had been wearing as Sydney Carton, and, such was the state of my awareness that I noted with interest—no more—my lack of concern. Over my dressing room speaker I could hear a faint but voluminous sound like an ocean moving restlessly under an infinite sky. It was the rustle of a thousand dresses, the murmur of a thousand barely audible voices: it was the noise of an audience coming in to a theatre. I wondered why I was not more excited. Here I was, for the first time in my life, in a dressing room of my own, encased in a splendid costume, looking my best (such as it was) and obviously about to perform a major role. But what? You see! How strangely, how vividly I was conscious! This was no dream.

  The murmur from the speaker ceased and was replaced by a voice, metallic and impersonal.

  ‘Overture and beginners. Mr Romeo Cavendish to the stage, please! Mr Romeo Cavendish to the stage, please!’

  For all its mechanical intonations it was a gratifying speech to my ears. I rose with the luxurious stealth of a practiced performer. I permitted myself a turn in the full-length mirror with which I had been thoughtfully provided and then opened the door into the passage.

  Here I was confronted with a problem: which way to the stage? There was no-one about whom I could ask. There were other doors in the passage but when knocked on yielded no answer from beyond, and they were locked. I would have to follow my instinct so I turned left, knowing that the main entrance to the stage was usually ‘prompt side’ or stage left.

  I turned a corner and—yes!—I had been right. There was a pair of dark red swing doors with the word STAGE written in bold white paint across them. Imperiously I pushed them both open and entered. With a reverential sigh the dark red doors closed behind me.

  I was now in the wings of the theatre. I noticed shadowy figures moving about in the gloom and nodded to them with distant friendliness. The only light came from a single ‘worker’ which shone down from a space high above the curtain behind which I could hear the muffled tumult of my audience. I looked up into the fly tower, hung with cloths and pieces of scenery, but there was no roof, only an infinite regression of theatrical paraphernalia. It was all very impressive and at this moment perhaps I should have been feeling fear, but I did not, at least not predominantly. It was all too exciting. I smelt the immemorial smell of backstage: the ‘size’ that is painted on scenery, a hint of greasepaint and face powder, a faint suggestion of sweat and orange peel.

  Presently I became aware that a shadowy figure in the prompt corner was gesturing to me. I should take my place on stage for the opening of the show. I walked on and found myself in a set which looked like the courtyard of a castle. It was detailed and heavily ornamented with Gothic crockets and finials, ogival arches, turrets and stairs. It was a fine thing and if I found it a little oppressive that was only natural. The one feature of the set that seemed a little out of place was a vast structure, about as high as the castle walls, which stood on one of the rostra. It was a guillotine. Was this, after all, A Tale of Two Cities?

  I placed myself on a platform from which a flight of steps led down to the stage level. Behind me was a gothic portal, the keystone of which was carved in the shape of a grinning mask with prominent teeth. I approved the workmanship, even though the whole effect was a little disconcerting. I could not rid myself of the impression that the jaws were slowly moving, and that I could have heard words if the muttering of the audience and the tuning of an orchestra beyond the curtain had been softer.

  I might have begun to think what I was doing there but just then from beyond the curtain I heard the crackle of applause. Then, after a brief silence the overture began. I recognised the music as mid nineteenth century romantic—by Weber perhaps or Marschner? It was one of those, but perhaps neither, all crashing chords, rushing climaxes and shivering string arpeggios. There seemed to be no discernible melody; however it was exciting enough and almost alarmingly consonant with the thrilling terror in my head. Then the working light snapped off and I was left for a moment in complete darkness until I saw that the curtain was slowly rising and the lights beyond were being revealed.

  For several seconds all I saw was lights, concentrated as they were, gratifyingly, on myself, but as the orchestra came to its crashing conclusion my eyes became accustomed to the scene. The auditorium before me was vast, far vaster than any I had ever been in before. It was not a theatre, it was an opera house, and an opera house greater than any I had ever seen: a giant red plush and gilt stadium, palatial in its grandeur. Above the stalls which stretched back into obscurity, there was a grand tier, full of gilded boxes, every inch decorated with writhing plaster putti, swags of flowers, tritons, sea monsters and other opulent mythical beasts. Above the grand tier was a royal circle, above that another and another, one above the other encircling the stalls into infinity, and every seat was occupied. The men were in white tie and tails; the women, gowned and jewelled, coruscated faintly in the dimness,

  I was facing the greatest audience I had ever seen. I did not at that moment know what I felt, my emotions were so conflicted. Trying to compose myself I looked at the faces of my public. They were all white, it seemed to me, and curiously nondescript. I tried to concentrate on one. It looked as if it had been made of dough with two holes punched in it for eyes and a lipless maw for a mouth. The nose was little more than a blobby protuberance, but, even as I stared at it, the features changed, stretched, expanded and contracted into a different set of features, equally vague and nondescript.

  The overture finished with a great clash on the cymbals and a monumental chord on the brass. After a spattering of applause there was a silence and I knew that it was my turn: all eyes were on me. For a brief moment I wondered what on earth I was going to do or say, then I opened my mouth and the words came rolling out.

  Round the wide earth’s unhindered mindless crust

  I seek the regions of my boneless life

  Passing through miles of incandescent dust

  Onto the plains of fire-encircled strife . . .

  The words seemed to come out of me from nowhere. I could hear the faint echo of my voice as it resounded through that boundless auditorium. My utterance soared through the edifice. I was exhilarated; I had achieved the pinnacle of theatrical magnificence, and yet—what on earth was I saying? What play was I in? What part was I playing? What the hell did it all mean? Still the words came—

  Moons that have been and stars that burgeon still

  Extinguish all but my undented soul

  Hopeless and sad, I grind the bitter pill

  And still the wind that blows from pole to pole . . .

  The absolute silence that had greeted my first four lines were now being punctuated by little ripples of laughter from odd corners of the auditorium. Coughs and snorts, like tiny gunshots indicated that some people were beginning to lose control of themselves. A part of me began to despair, but I continued to speak, raising my voice, trying to assume greater authority over the words that seemed to me to mean even less than they did to my public . . .

  A piece of elsewhere, parsnip
-trousered now

  Pervades old songs that whisper in the gloom

  I sport a peacock on my furrowed brow

  As boldly I invade my punctured tomb . . .

  By this time the titters had expanded into laughter which was coming from all quarters of that vast and limitless theatre, drowning any sound of my own voice. I could no longer hear myself speak. I stared at the millions of faces whose mouths, grinning, almost retching with mocking merriment, now obscured every other aspect of their elastic faces. They were just grinning maws on top of boiled shirtfronts and jewel-encrusted necks. That great golden opera house was alive with laughter, and all of it directed at me.

  I rest and yet I rest not. Winter burns,

  And summer shuts up mice in golden urns.

  The words were barely coming out. My heart was pounding. The horror of it was building. Words came to me, as if I had learned them, but they made no sense and the laughter built and built until it became a deafening roar. Then, with a great effort, I stopped myself from speaking and all at once a silence fell as piercing and terrible as the roar. I had to speak: anything, even derision, was better than this silence, in which the embarrassment of failure was magnified by a thousand. But now, no words, not even gibberish came up to me from my subconscious. I cast around for something to say and then I remembered one speech, one only, so I spoke it:

  ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’

  A great roar of derision went up, accompanied by a thunder of feet upon the ground. The noise became intolerable. I covered my ears with my hands and ran from the stage. Now where would I go? For what seemed like an age I was blundering about in the wings. The stage was still brightly lit but very little of the illumination penetrated beyond it. At last I found the pass door and was in to the back stage corridors which seemed to stretch a very long way in both directions.

  I considered my position. I needed to escape from the theatre and to do so I must find the stage door. I had no idea where to find it or even whether the corridor I was in was at ground level. Having emerged from the stage from a pass door roughly situated in the middle of the back wall, there was no obvious direction in which to go. I turned to my left.

  Along the corridor were several doors, and on each was a gleaming brass plate on which had been incised in italicised capitals: ROMEO CAVENDISH. I tried one of the doors, but it was locked. Something told me that I should not try to enter. I walked along the corridor until I found some stairs which led upwards. I ascended them and found, not as I had hoped, an exit via the stage door but another corridor with a blank wall on one side and a row of doors on the other. On each of the doors was a brass plate or a card affixed by adhesive, or a mere piece of paper attached by a drawing pin. All bore the same two-word legend: ROMEO CAVENDISH. I tried one of the doors, but it would not open and my reluctance to try again overwhelmed my now desperate need to escape. It is hard to describe exactly what I was feeling. My emotions were vivid, but also somehow conflicted. Was it fear? Not exactly. It was more a deep feeling that something in this world that I had entered was wrong and there was no remedy for it. I felt hopeless, or helpless: one or the other; but perhaps both. I listened at one of the doors and heard a kind of chanting sound which at first I did not understand, then I recognised the tune. It was the gallop from Rossini’s overture to William Tell, to which words had been put.

  ‘Many men, many men, many men, men, men!

  Many men, many men, many men, men, men!

  Many men, many men, many men, men, men!

  Many men!

  Many men, men, men . . . !’

  A long time ago—it seemed to me—when I had been an actor on the stage I used to do it in the dressing room as a vocal warm-up, to aid articulation. It sounded . . . It sounded horribly like my own voice. I began to run down the corridor almost blindly in search of some way out. I came to another flight of stone steps. They led upwards and I took them.

  The last staircase wound upwards and was almost too narrow to ascend, but I went on up though the light dwindled to nothing and there was no window. I was in total blackness by the time I came up against a wooden door. I felt its bars and grooves, its cold iron studs until I found a ring handle. I turned the ring and the door opened into an all but blinding light, but the brightness was a temporary illusion, merely a contrast with the darkness that had gone before.

  The scene that confronted me was more astonishing than any I had yet seen. I was high up, I knew that, because by rights I must have been on the roof of the theatre, but what I saw was a garden surrounded by a low wall with seven sides and at each apex of the vast polygonal enclosure, a stone tower from the door of one of which I had just emerged.

  Above me the sky was a deep evening blue, clear but starless. Beyond the walls I could see far below me a level dispersal of thick grey cloud through whose gaps I discerned fragments of a vast grey city, many miles beneath me. The area enclosed by the wall was a smooth, enamelled sward of emerald grass punctuated by stone paths. There were parterres, stands of trees, high hedges of box and yew, shaved to an unnatural perfection, and clumps of tall dark green cypresses like narrow-shouldered ghosts. Among this scattered vegetation stood stone monuments and mausolea in the forms of classical temples or gothic chapels. I was standing in a vast roof garden of the dead.

  The air was motionless and soundless. Not a bird sang; not an insect clapped its thin legs together. And yet, I felt, for the first time, no fear or agitation, not even oppression or sadness. There was a calm here, almost a serenity, if it were not for the fact that the atmosphere was so utterly without life or motion. I felt neither cold nor heat. After the frantic emotions of my previous experiences I might have welcomed the stillness. Here was a state that I could enter into, but something told me I should not be ready for it.

  Yet this solemn abode was a rest and it had a beauty. I walked towards the centre of this garden enclave, examining as I did so, the monuments and temples that gleamed with smooth white marble. They all had elaborate inscriptions carved into the stone, but in some script that I could not read. I stared at the lettering and knew that I ought to be able to decipher them but the faculty had been taken away from me. I had become an unlettered child again. Many of these stone edifices carried statues and busts in their niches. The features were beautifully carved with a smoothness and minuteness that defied belief. I felt I ought to recognise them but I did not. Trying to recollect them now, I think I must have seen Shakespeare, Molière, Sophocles, Shaw, Chekhov, Aeschylus, but I cannot be certain. The withdrawal of my faculty of recognition baffles my memory.

  Moving inwards always among the sad cypresses and stone monuments I felt myself turning away slowly but steadily from all outside influence. I felt calmer and more serene, and yet a stubborn resistance to this stillness remained. As I was contemplating this strange, quiet conflict deep within me I came before the high walls of a great yew hedge, of a green so deep and so smoothly shaved that it looked almost like a slab of black marble. In it an arched entrance had been cut and at the apex of the arch hung a polished wooden board on which letters had been deeply incised. I struggled more than ever to decipher what was written, but again my faculties failed me. I believed I ought to know but the letters—if they were letters—meant nothing. Still I went through the arch.

  I was in a maze. The yew hedges rose about twelve feet in the air on either side of emerald green paths of closely shaven glass. The paths were over three feet wide, not oppressively narrow, in spite of which the feeling of being enclosed was pervasive. I gathered some reassurance from the constancy of the deep blue sky above me, the colour of a sunlit ocean, yet it still disturbed me that I could see no sun, or stars, or other source of light.

  I wandered randomly in the maze, taking turnings on a whim, not thinking of the consequences, or rather trying not to think of them, until I was stopped. Something had changed, and it took me a while to
identify the nature of that change. It was not something I had heard or seen, but a smell. A scent had invaded the utter stillness of the scene. I recognised the odour as familiar, but could not identify it. At first I thought I would experience again the frustration I had known through my inability to read the inscriptions or identify the sculptures in the garden, but I held myself in patience until it came to me. ‘I shall return,’ it said.

  My mother had a favourite perfume. It was called Je Reviendrai, a creation by Coty, I believe, and one of the last acts of my father before he had left her for a younger woman was to give her a large flacon of this peculiarly costly fragrance. Whether he intended this gift as a gesture of sentimental regret, or as a cruel joke I do not know, but to her dying day my mother wore no other scent. She had asked for the flacon (of opaque blue-green glass and designed by Lalique) to be buried with her and I complied with her request.

  I followed the scent as best I could, but I am not a dog and I took many false turnings on the trail, but the scent did become stronger. At last, at the end of a long straight avenue of dark green yew I saw a figure in a dark grey silken dress that swept the ground. The head was turned away but the set of the shoulders, the figure, the carriage of the head were all unmistakeably my mother’s. She turned a corner and I went her way.

  And so began a long quiet pursuit. She was always ahead of me by some twenty yards or so, and however hard I ran she remained ahead of me at a constant distance. She never turned back to look at me or indicated by any gesture that I should follow her.