by Rebecca West
He was passing a florist’s shop, that had not drawn its blinds and was as a wall of dark, shining water, in which, it seemed, a nymph had drowned; for in its depths there stood alone a vase of very white flowers. “Is it not fatuous,” he mused, putting his face close to the glass and letting his teeth leave his lips in a sneer, “that the lily should be held as an emblem of purity? I do not know any flower that is better fitted to symbolise the most perverse confusion. Look at its shape that suggests a mineral substance that has been cut and carved and is immortal! What a lie that is, when it is made of stuff corruptible as cabbage, that a rude finger-nail can bruise as brown as dung. Oh, I would like to break this window, and then rush in and break the vase and snap the lily stems and stamp on the flowers until no one could tell there had been anything here but something vegetable that had the capacity to rot and stink. To snap those stems would give one such delight….” Panting, he stayed and planned the crime until a deepening of the darkness in the glass, a heartening of the mirrored lights, made him aware that the world had sprung on him another change, and he spun about, looking very cunning.
But it was only that night was now achieved, and artificial light had come into its own. The electric standards laid their will of white brilliance on the streets, and the smiling faces had been unmasked and streaked with luminous paint, and the hurrying bodies subdued to the colour of grey cats. Such of the shops that had remained unshuttered lit up their goods and threw over the passers-by pailfuls of harsh illuminations. “Oh, it is far too bright!” breathed Condorex, putting his head down as he hastened on his way. “To-night I would like darkness. I do not want to be lit to bed by these strangers. Why do they say to me: ‘Here is a candle to light you to bed. Here is a chopper to chop off your head….’ God, what a sinister rhythm those words tread out on the ear! It is the very gait of a murderer, stealing behind his victim! To think that is part of a nursery rhyme, that tender infants are instructed to move in such a measure! Yet I do not know that that is so very shameful. Is it not perhaps the subterfuge of some pagan force of wisdom, long persecuted by this new mewling Christian affectation, yet too concerned with man’s survival to leave him without instruction in his necessity to defend himself from ruin by his enemies, his opposites …”
He had to stop and master himself, for he had now before him the task of crossing that open space which is dominated by the embarrassment of the Marble Arch, who, good dumpy widow that she is, knows she will drop dead if the tall picture-palace pressing so close behind her should accost her. At night she is quite blue with fear, for it is notorious what bad men think of with increasing boldness after sundown. And no one cares! The traffic goes on its godless way and not one item of it stops to say how good it is in these days to see a woman who is not loose. “How I wish,” he said, laughing aloud again, and balancing on his heels, at the edge of the curb, “that my fantasy were true! I should like some place in London where there are great outgoings and incomings to be dominated by a vast figure of a woman who had once been beautiful but was now made ill-favoured by age, and who was ridiculous as ageing women are, perpetually set against the sky in some grotesque state of discomfiture. Then one could look out from one’s automobile and be refreshed. That would be better than all these statues of statesmen, who (though I have no desire to foul my own nest) have no particular message to give in marble terms. How curious to think there will never be a statue of me now in any square! Oh, the malignity of my opposite, which saw to it that when I fixed a deed to happen on the stroke of midnight all clocks in the world would strike thirteen! Oh, I must go on!”
Without caution he ran across the road. Swords struck at him, but they were not made of steel, being beams from the headlights of automobiles. Shouts were raised, but not by armies, nor by mass meetings of the Primrose League, or by the boys at the Mill Hill prizegiving, or any crowd such as he was accustomed to review. He waved at the unseen people whose swords and shouts these were, to show that the matter was too low for him to be concerned with it, and passed into the Park. The road stretched from the Park Gates widely as if it were meant for several kings to ride abreast, the traffic spun gold lines to it and from it with the smooth, slow rhythm of a capital. Pleased by the scene, he crossed the road with a swinging, monarchic gait, saying, “Now shall I defeat my opposite by looking at the trees. If it is a dead leaf that I find, it shall have a finer funeral oration than any Cæsar, and if it be a bud, how shall it overestimate its importance in the world through hearing my wild pæan of its being! But—what is this? There are trees here! An avenue of them lining the road! I need go no further to read my riddle!” He was discomposed. He had thought of other trees that would give him the news, trees in the centre of the Park. But as he gazed towards these which he increasingly wished were not here, he saw that beneath them were built flat cairns of mankind, the summit of which swayed, let its hands sing out, and emitted sounds. “Why, these tub-thumpers and their followers are just the very dabblers in public matters who would be the quickest to recognise me! Decidedly,” said he, pulling his hat down over his brow and turning up his collar, “I cannot stray among such as these to get news. Come, I must visit the chaster groves that have chosen a more secluded station.”
Very robustly he stepped along an asphalt walk that left behind the Marble Arch, the road, the orators, and waved his hand across the grass to a row of lights that on his left marched more directly southward. “I shall meet you later!” he said cheerily. “This is a short-cut. Ah, how I love a straight road. It has the beauty (of a peculiar kind, I grant you, yet I maintain a true beauty, that endures when smoother kinds have failed) of a weapon pointed at the heart of its due victim;” At that moment there came towards him out of the darkness a couple of policemen, steadily lurching from foot to foot, grave-bodied like great dogs. He went down into his collar, and did not have the spirit to come out of it and laugh at himself till the slow creaking tattoo of their tread had long passed from him. “Why are you afraid?” he asked himself. “To take a walk, to look at a tree, are these ends not harmless enough? And I perceive that so far as one end is concerned you have nearly attained it, for the plantations that were but delicate islands against the skyline when you took this path are revolving themselves into their component parts, any one of which will answer your riddle. Indeed, you need not go so far, for hardly a hundred yards away I see a modest grove of trees, spread out on either side of the path, that should serve your purpose as well as a forest. Try yonder tree, that I am not country enough to name, but is very upstanding and looks as if it would answer a civil question.”
He left the path, and strolled along very easily, looking downward and letting his breath hiss through his teeth. “Oh, it is good,” he said, “to feel earth, slightly wet, and grass, under one’s feet! I suppose the pleasure that it gives is not unlike that which those horrible ruffians, the Eastern tyrants (how necessary it was that Mangostan should become a British Protectorate!), devise from walking on the throbbing bodies of their victims. I thank whatever powers there be which implanted in me the capacity to enjoy the more innocent delight. I am, indeed, surprised at my own innocence to-night. For I do not know when I have enjoyed a carouse as much as I have enjoyed this purposeless ramble.” He swung around and looked back at the meek, crouching darkness of the grassy flats, over which the lighted walks marched militantly like soldiers sent out from the emblazoning city, that pressed its frontier of giant electric standards up to the plumy edges of the park like a victorious power closing in on a beaten people, and varnished the clouds above with its own glow. “How sweet it is,” he said, “to see the sky all tinged with red! ’Tis nearly impossible not to believe that there is a conflagration raging which shall turn every man and every woman in London to ashes by morning.” He watched awhile, sighed “Hey-ho!” and turned about again, saying briskly, “Now for the tree.”
For the last ten paces he kept his eyes on the grass, then raised his eyes to the tree-trunk. “I must tell you it is my
salvation that you are lifting to the skies,” he said gratefully. He smiled at the bark as if it were the face of a friend. “Ay,” he said, “Here is Nature, which is neutral and cannot be suborned by my opposite. The spiritual world is infected against me, that I know, but here is good hearty matter which is not permeable by hate, and will tell me honestly how the land lies.” Still smiling, and laying his hands on each side of the tree-trunk as if he would have taken it by the coat-lapels had it been a man, he looked up at the branches.
When the drumming of the blood in his ears grew too loud, he cried pitifully, “Wait, do not hurry me!” and staggered for an instant.
He steadied his weight against the tree-trunk, thrusting out his stomach as old men do, and dropped his jaw so that his strength might have as little to take care of as might be; and he looked up again. A part of him grumbled, “Ah, you poor dog, your eye must climb branch by branch, and take a census of each twig. If you were a poet, now, you would be endowed with a knack of apprehension that would make the tree grow within your knowledge instantly you saw it.” “Ay,” said another part of him, “but poets are worthless folk, I would not be a poet.” “That is no excuse for the universe,” answered the part that spoke at first, “why should worthless folk be dowered with so useful a gift? You might as well put your head down against the tree-trunk and weep. Weeping is the apposite act to this dispensation.” But the rest of him kept his neck stiffly uplifted. Then he drew back and cried, “It is not possible that I cannot see anything up there save some stars that have caught in your branches! Is it conceivable that you have not one dead leaf to show me, and not one bud! Then I am lost, I am lost!” He kicked the bole that curved down to the ground. “Do you think it is enough for me to know that it is not summer! For I know more than that, since a ferocious autumn or a dilatory spring might leave you bare like this. I am lost in a desert the size of half a year!”
“I told you,” said a part of him, “that you had better lay your head against the tree-trunk and weep.”
“But what is this?” cried the other parts of him. “I had forgotten how profoundly infected is the spiritual world! Do you not see that it would be the first device of your opposite to make you seek out the tree in this grove that had been blighted! Try another one!”
He ran to another, grasped it, and looked up: and did so with another one, and with another one, and with another one. The asphalt path was hard under his heels. But the half of the grove that was on its other side gave him no more fresh news.
“There is not one of you that has more about you than the stars which have caught on your long hair!” he groaned. “Oh, I am utterly lost! And it is worse to be lost in time than in space, for it is not known what happens! If I were wandering on the desert I should presently die and become a heap of bones to appal the later traveller; but for all I know I may be wandering as irretrievably away from death as towards it. And am I perhaps moving in a circle? Am I perhaps even now entering the same moment where I was ten minutes ago! Oh, my opposite, my obscene opposite!”
He began to run along the asphalt path, and did not stop until he had come to a junction of several such paths, at a place where there was a thicker grove, and a large house that was full of lights and had a lamppost beside it marked, “POLICE.” At that he scowled and said, “There is interference everywhere”; and walked with a more furtive gait down a slight hill that was before him. On each side of him incommunicative tree-trunks held high branches that were always bare. “There are thousands of them,” he thought furiously, “they drive avenues into the darkness every way, and they are all my enemies. Oh, I see what is happening!” He stood still and shook his head at them. “Matter, did I call you neutral? I had then overlooked one little aspect of you. There is an element in all matter subject to growth and decay which cannot be accounted for by its own properties. At any given moment an object is as it is, and if it is as it is, then it is not changing. Since this is true of all moments in its life, then it should never change, should never grow, never decay. Yet change and growth and decay so permeate life that some say they are all of it. How are they achieved? Why, by the will of the spiritual world that pushes matter here and there out of its disposition to stockishness.” He flung out his arm at the immobile trees. “And that will has ceased to work! Look at them! Is there a movement stirs a twig! And see, does not the rising moon show those trunks strangely carven-looking, have they not a cold appearance as if they had slipped backwards from the state of being wood which knows the rise and fall of sap, into the state of being stone, which knows nothing but its own even being? Do they not look as if change had ceased to work on them? And that man and woman on those two seats over there, is it not evident from the sack-like way they sit that they will never move again? I tell you, the will of the spiritual world is paralysed. And it has become so by the pull of two strong opposites! Oh, I must instantly relieve humanity of its sufferings, which must be immense!” He began to run towards the road he saw at the end of his path. “Think of the lovers,” he panted, “stretched taut on the rack of their own delight for ever! Think of the child, exempt from this curse by its non-being, threshing about within its mother and never being shown the road to freedom! Think of these that perpetually live who should long have been lanced out of the sound body of life by the surgeon Death! Oh, I must act!”
He was walking along the road by now. Automobiles spun by him, but that did not dismay his sureness of his case. “Ay, they are moving,” he admitted, “but do you not see how this paralysis of the spiritual will would operate? All would continue as it was at the moment the curse fell. The trees that were bare and had been jilted by the wind at that moment shall stand stripped and forsaken forever. That man and woman who sat so heavily pondering whether it could not be put out to nurse with Aunt Emmy at Portsmouth and none be the wiser shall squat there till eternity be sent down to the butler’s pantry to be cleaned. And that which was moving shall perpetually be confined to its notion. See how that poor sentinel walks up and down in front of the classic colonnade of the Powder Magazine across the road! Without cease he shall trot up and down that moonlit oblong, his fur busby covered with a second fur of moonbeams, with not a chance to stop and use his good bayonet to kill. (Oh, I must hurry, I must hurry!) And these automobiles run by me because they were so doing when change was annulled and therefore cannot stop. No doubt they were in Leeds or Salisbury when the devilish work began, and before it is done with drive down into the sea in search of rest; and when they have done that, poor souls, they will not find peace, for they will find themselves obliged to drive and drive under the waves, and those ground swells will make bumpy roads. Oh, the infernal pull of opposites! I must end it without an instant’s delay.”
He set himself to a trot, and had but time to bend his neck over the Serpentine Bridge; but what he saw made him shake his head gravely enough as he jogged on. “Ay, there has been abolished order. That is shown by the destruction of that division between human beings, which confined one to little fiddling activities which are but one disguise worn by obscurity, and exalting another of more grandiose make to appropriate grandeur; for I, even I, am threatened with obscurity. And here I see there is setting in a further confusion of substance. That was not water underneath the bridge. It was black and hard. It was marble, or agate, or onyx. Those images of trees, those smeared replicas of light, they are very different from reflections on water that has not been tampered with; they were as markings on rare minerals. Oh, have I not seen man-high vases of such stones in the palaces of Italy and fatuously admired the cities and lakes and forests in their depths,” he groaned, “and never guessed that these commemorated times when the lovely living earth was petrified by the foul action of opposites! For so it must have been. Yet, God knows such horrors are exceptional.
Water is for the most part truly water, and reflections have behaved gracefully like ladies dancing. The spell sometimes breaks: though doubtless not of itself. Oh, I will not be dismayed though the m
oonlight looks far more like rime than itself on the grass beneath yonder groves. There are victories to be gained,” he panted, “if the hand is but steady enough.” He went on at a jog-trot until he saw the lights that march along the southern border of the Park, and waved to them gaily, crying, “I told you we should meet later! For I have had a curious notion all the evening,” he said, wagging his head, as he came out of the Park gates, “that my walk would in the end bring me to Kensington.” And certainly he stood on the earth of the Royal Borough. Some of these poor doomed automobiles that would before long spin their wheels among the fishes had to go by before he could cross the road; and while he waited he eyed with a sneer the stiff snake of light opposite that marked the street down which he meant to go. “It descends a considerable hill,” he said grimly, “Kensington lies very low, for all its gentility. Its boasted squares have indeed the quality of a lilac-bush bursting from a grave.” He laughed aloud.
“Lights, lights, there are too many lights in this street,” he grumbled as he trudged, getting down into his collar. “And for all the vastyness of these houses, how little true majesty they have! They are quite comically without the importance of my own part of the world, where we are all statesmen. Owing to this accursed confusion of substance they look in this moonlight very like enamelled tinware, and that with their design gives them an exact resemblance to magnified jelly-moulds. I do not think that persons of the highest consequence would ever live here. Yet Sir George had his residence here, I seem to remember. Ay, that is what I mean,” he gibed. “It is just the place where Sir George would live. But does he live anywhere, or is he dead? Oh, I should have known if he had died,” he told himself bitterly, “from the long and fulsome obituaries. Everyone would speak well of him, for he was high-born and exceedingly rich from the beginning.” He tramped on, thinking no thought in particular, but blanketing his mind with a general hot close-weaved disposition of hatred against his fellows, when at his elbows he heard a gentle scuffling sound, and wheeled about. There in the coign of a porch and an area-railing he saw a meanly dressed boy and girl who, perceiving how the night permitted nothing to stand sharp and separate but fused all in darkness, were so doing with their lips and arms and bosoms. “Faugh!” said he. “Faugh!” But they did not hear him, and though they drew apart it was not to pay him attention, but to confirm the wonder that, God knows why, they felt at the sight of each other’s very ordinary round eyes and snub noses as amazed at life as puppies’ muzzles are. “Tck! Tck!” he said, as one who sees a practice that, persisted in, will wreck the State, and strode along, till suddenly he plumped down on the steps of a great house as if he had been a gipsy and cared not a thing for appearances. “My feet hurt,” he whined. “It is years since I walked so long a way on pavements! And ought I not to run back and tell these two young people that they are opposites, and what the end of it will be? But they will not believe me. The beginning of the business is very enjoyable. Ah, is it not, is it not! Oh, I must go on if ever I am to save us all!” Up he picked himself, though he seemed to weigh half a ton and to be another person, and he set off on his jog-trot again.
