Short Stories 1927-1956 (75 page)

Mrs Millington had sat, her hands in her lap, motionlessly listening, her eyes still fixed on the darkening scene beyond the window, as if she were waiting for something to happen; or was in search of something within her mind, but mislaid.

‘I had no notion, William,’ she said at length, ‘that you dissected your – that you analysed people like that. To such an extreme. And why “disastrous”? I can’t quite see, either – if he
had
nothing to consult you about – why you should have fancied otherwise. As for sharing people’s thoughts …’ Her voice had fallen a little flat and she failed to finish the sentence.

Her husband glanced back at her again, over his glasses. ‘Why, yes, though you may not know it, I share your thoughts sometimes,’ he assured her – almost with the shyness of a child confiding a secret. ‘But it’s Louis I was thinking of. I can’t really make him out. “Dissect”, indeed! He’s so unpredictable, elusive, keeps to cover – in spite of all that gaiety, all that charm. I don’t mean to suggest any definite antipathy. The truth is my old wits are a bit too sluggish for him; always have been. Anyhow, it wasn’t really
that
I had in mind. As I say, we had a long talk; I’m not a bad listener, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But for that very reason perhaps I drank too much of his special whisky, so it began to languish a little towards midnight. Nonetheless there was again that feeling of something definite coming and yet failing to come. As when one wants to sneeze, and can’t. Actually, it was involved in the dream I was going to tell you about. In the best
guest-chamber
too; and I pay my respects to Louis’s or his housekeeper’s taste in curtains and bed linen. Unless he has other help.’

‘In the guest-room?
There
,
you mean? Last night?’

‘Yes, indeed; in the guest-room; a very pleasant room, too. You don’t know the house, of course – I mean its upper parts?’

She fixedly returned his absent stare.

‘We have only been there two or three times, William – to luncheon.’

‘So it was: twice,’ replied her husband, after another gulp at his cold tea and even a bite of his thin bread and butter. ‘And one doesn’t have luncheon in the guest-room, darling, does one?’

But to this little sally, and one so absurdly inviting an easy witticism, Mrs Millington said nothing. Her sewing lay in her lap, both her hands were pressed down into it as if it didn’t matter in the least how much tumbled and creased the delicate fabric became.

‘The real point,’ continued her husband, ‘is not so much the dream, but
something that followed it; a sort of confession, my dear. Have you time, the patience to listen for – well, perhaps another ten whole minutes?’

There was nothing to show that she had heard the question, except that she replied in a low, ridiculously serious voice, ‘Of course I can listen, if only – well – you’ll go straight on. Why couldn’t we have
begun
at the dream? Anyone would suppose …’

She broke off, rose from her chair, and sat down again. ‘The clouds are gathering – look! Up and up and up. There’s going to be a storm. I have a headache. But here I am; I want to hear the dream – and the rest. On the other hand, William, if the thunder begins … well, you see, I couldn’t.’

Certainly the sun had left the garden, and the gloom that now lay over it in a dead and menacing quietude and stagnation was not that of an ordinary twilight. Still, presages of storm often cheat even the weather-wise in a climate so fickle as England’s; and everything might blow over.

‘Well,’ her husband was continuing meditatively, ‘it was a very odd dream, odd to me at any rate; but other people’s dreams are so dreadfully wearisome and always seem so pointless. I wish, indeed, my dear, you hadn’t a headache.’ His voice had become a little plaintive. ‘I, too, have just the rudiments of one. The same cause, thunder perhaps; but more likely Louis’s whisky. Well, as I say, we talked until nearly midnight. He told me how one can avoid the effects of taking too much! His tongue darts about like a dragon-fly, never staying for more than a moment on any single subject or object. Nor does his eye. I found it wearisome at last. Besides, whether right or wrong, I had the impression that much of it was talking for talking’s sake, that he must be in some anxiety, had perhaps something on his mind, wished perhaps that I hadn’t come; though there was nothing, except, perhaps, his manner, to suggest it, and – his occasional silences. He
is
an oddity, you know, Margaret: so mercurial, and unstable perhaps. I wonder what you yourself really think of him? Is what I say anything like your view of him too?’

Mrs Millington was re-threading her needle, and with an obstinate cotton-end, and in the failing light. ‘Yes,’ she said at last; ‘I should imagine it
is
much the same. Aren’t all – temperamental people like that? restless and impulsive? You mean, I suppose, that he is unlikely to stay fixed in any one intention, is never sure of his own mind? Is that what you mean?’ But the faint voice that had put the question seemed not to be in any need of an answer. It was as if, in spite of the tense silence, she would not even be
interested
in any reply.

‘What baffles me most of all,’ said her husband, ‘is that he has never yet been able to fix his
heart
on anything. The truth is, my dear, he ought to have found a wife somehow – long ago. Perfectly easy! Not that my
congratulations
to her would not have been tempered with misgivings.’

‘What
was
the dream, William?’

‘Well, as I say, I got to bed very late. A charming room, too, facing south: otherwise the moonlight couldn’t have got in through the curtains. Louis has “taste” enough to run an “antique” furnishing shop. And yet he lets his roof leak.’

‘His roof leak?’

‘I’ll come to that later. As you know, I am very rarely favoured with a dream and when I am, I usually fail to remember it. Nor are hieroglyphics’ – he laughed softly to himself – ‘my strong point. Anyhow, when I awoke, it was, I suppose, about two o’clock in the morning. Suddenly and softly wide-awake – as though I had been called, as though a drowsy voice had called me. I had dreamt that I was lying face upwards on a very low bed, immured in the deep, dark, stony bowels of a pyramid, but without the least knowledge of how I had managed to get there, and convinced that there was no way out – not even by the way by which I must have come in.

‘I was terrified, and in acute distress. In the faint, dusky light, I could see that there was a very fine sand on the floor, and a few old broken or derelict relics of objects which I couldn’t distinguish – sacred furniture and images, I suppose. The place appeared to have been rifled; but there was no trace, as far as I can recall, of any sarcophagus or of any mummy, although some sort of both presumably there must once have been. Was
I
the mummy?

‘The sand was of the finest dust on the stony floor, and the walls were arabesqued with inscriptions – flowers, figures, serpents and so forth. I was only vaguely aware of this, for my attention had become fixed on one small oblong lozenge-shaped hieroglyphic or cartouche.

‘As you know, a cartouche usually contains the characters of some
sovereign’s
name; Cleopatra’s has two birds in it – heads to the west – as
indeed
hers finally was! Apart from this there was no other design that I can recall on the stone ceiling over my head. Where the light was coming from I cannot say; in sleep perhaps our own eyes supply it, like a cat’s. The characters in the cartouche resembled, left to right, first a crouching animal with a child’s face; tiny, I surmise, of course, but greatly dream-magnified. It was also very lovely. Next, there was a tree – a willow or weeping ash, something of that kind; and next to that, and partly under it, stood what appeared to be a box or chest or tomb with a rounded top – of the shape of a sarcophagus but much smaller. There was even a sort of sullen glitter from the precious stones with which it had been inlaid – although, as I say, this was only a representation of it. I realized that it had once contained the vital parts of some inmate, the heart, viscera and so forth; but that now it was empty. The astonishing thing is that I knew in my dream perfectly well what all these emblems stood for and what they signified. A desperate
cankering grief for one thing – the
weeping
willow. An inward descent
towards
death. It was as if the past had resolved itself into this tiny esoteric pattern and that I could grasp it in an instant of time, and interpret its every single syllable as briefly. “The secrets of all hearts”, my dear. But
that
was in the dream.’

Mrs Millington had been so intent on this fantastic and muddled
narrative
that she had hardly stirred since her husband had begun to relate it. But although a dream, so comparatively commonplace, could hardly be the cause of her repressed excitement, it was almost as if in entreaty or reproach that she put her next question: ‘William, you aren’t making all this up? You aren’t playing with me? It
was
a dream?’

‘I am telling you everything precisely as I recall it,’ was his reply. ‘But listen; you must await the sequel. That is what is going to be my real little difficulty. And I shall feel all the better when it is over. All that was just the dream. What, when I
woke
,
I knew, or at any rate supposed, to be the
meaning
of the emblems, of the complete design of the cartouche – and please don’t scoff – was just this and only this. It meant, “It was Here”. “It
happened
Here”. Although I hadn’t the faintest conception
what
!
It sounds ludicrous, but that was absolutely all. But although as is the way with dreams, I took it to be a sort of personal and private message or
communication
, it must merely have referred of course to the unhappy fate, the destiny – who knows what? – of the poor creature, the mummy that had been interred there, in its stony sepulchre. At least so one may
surmise.
Well, so much for the dream.’

The ageing face, again turned sidelong and away from her, looked fagged and colourless and depressed, as if it were still in some degree enslaved by a mere illusion; and the eyes in it were once more fixed upon the ceiling overhead, although this appeared to be completely unintentional and
innocent
of any design. Once more untidy tufts of grizzled hair were showing grotesquely above the darkened leather of the chair and the awkward contents of it resembling an old-fashioned tailor’s dummy partially
dismembered
. Not that the owner of them would have been concerned in the least at what he looked like; he preferred ‘taking things as they come’ and had never been in the habit of paying much attention to appearances: although his memory sometimes managed this unaided.

‘The fact is,’ he went on, ‘I can’t bear mysteries. Things in this world should be plain and above-board; as far, at any rate, as we humans can make them. And why a silly foolish inconsequent dream like that should leave any more impression than a child’s picture book on the waking rational mind I cannot conceive – if, that is, one’s mind
is
ever completely rational. No doubt these psycho-analysts could make hay, and pretty sour hay at that, of the whole thing. Whether or not, and I don’t care, it has
haunted me ever since. You see,
then
I knew the meaning of it; and to know all, they say, is to forgive all. But now it’s gone.

‘Besides, somehow or other, this seemed to be not merely and only a dream. For without being conscious of any transition from sleeping to waking, I presently, as I say, found myself lying on my back in Louis’s ornate and luxurious but most comfortable four-poster – staring up at
his
virgin plaster. The merest trickle of moonlight was edging in between the grey-blue window-curtains, causing the sort of dusky gloom that had seemed to be the illumination of my stony cell in the pyramid; yet it cast a pale narrow shaft of light clean across the ceiling. If she had not been well past the full this couldn’t of course have happened; though I don’t profess to be much of a moon expert. In fact, my dear, I claim to fall just that much short of being the “compleat” lunatic. There was light enough at any rate to show up vaguely the actual pattern of the stain on the whitewash – the stain, I mean, made by the rain that had leaked through the roof, or through the floorboards perhaps of an attic above me, owing to
Louis’s
loose tiles. To
that
degree we are both of us lunatics!

‘However that may be, there, sure enough, was the general design of the cartouche. And no doubt merely because the dreaming mind or fancy is so densely thronged with symbols which are supposed to be hints or warnings to the waking consciousness, I detected in the patterns precisely the same details as those of the dreamed-of hieroglyphics. Not only that; for some minutes together I accepted the same ridiculous interpretation: “It was Here”.
It
happened
Here.
And naturally, I was pestered by exactly the same question – What?

‘Well, all old beds – and Louis’s also – unless, which is quite possible, it is a fake, is Elizabethan – all old beds must not only have had scores of
nocturnal
occupants, but must have witnessed many uneasy, wakeful, miserable and possibly even tragic nights. Peaceful, pleasant, amorous, happy and visionary ones too. One is born, one marries, one dies; and all three usually involve a bed of some kind – from W.S.’s “second-best” to Procrustes’. They say, you know, that what are called ghosts may be merely an outcome, impressing the imagination of the living, of tragic events that have left their indelible mark on the inanimate objects around them. Why not a bed, then? Why not?’

He had paused again, but not as if in wait for any critical comment or appreciation, since he had at once hastened on with: ‘I don’t
want
,
my dear, naturally enough, to destroy my own little romance. But truth must out. When the very neat parlour-maid came in with my tea and drew back the grey-blue curtains, I had a good long look at Louis’s rain-stain in the full unflattering light of morning. Naturally. And, believe it or not, there was scarcely a vestige of the pattern I had seen in it in the small hours. It was
now no more than a lozenge-shaped blur which you could, if you wished, turn either into a catafalque with mourning plumes complete, or into some bower of delight out of the
Faerie
Queene
–
whichever most suited your fancy.’