Laura Riding

PROGRESS OF STORIES
With new material, including other early stories and a new preface
by

Laura (Riding) Jackson

Originally published in hardcover in 1982 by The Dial Press. First published in paperback in 1994 by
Persea Books.

S OURCES
A N A R C H I S M I S N O T E N O U G H first p ublished 1 9 2 8 by Jonathan Cap e, London E X P E RT S A R E
P U Z Z L E D first p ublished 1930 by Jonathan Cap e, London P R O G R E S S O F S T O R I E S first p ublished 1935 by
The Seizin Press, Dey a M ajorca and Constable & Co. Ltd, London The story, "Christmastime," first ap p eared in the Winter
1982 issue of Grandstreet.
To My Friends Barbara and James Mathias
Who know how to read this book Right—
Forwards from its early time, Backwards from Now
C O N TE N TS

Contents
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (1935)
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1982)
THE STORIES OF THE FIRST EDITION
I: Stories of Lives
SOCIALIST PLEASURES
THE FRIENDLY ONE
SCHOOLGIRLS
THE SECRET
THE INCURABLE VIRTUE
DAISY AND VENISON
THREE TIMES ROUND
II: Stories of Ideas
REALITY AS PORT HUNTLADY
MISS BANQUETT, OR THE POPULATING OF COSMANIA
III: Nearly True Stories
THE STORY-PIG
THE PLAYGROUND
A FAIRY TALE FOR OLDER PEOPLE
A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY
IV: A Crown for Hans Andersen
V: More Stories
IN THE BEGINNING
EVE'S SIDE OF IT
PRIVATENESS
IN THE END
OTHER EARLY STORIES
INTRODUCTION
FROM Anarchism Is Not Enough, 1928
Three Stories About Unexpressed Feelings, Including Mine, About
People, About Me
HOW CAME IT ABOUT?
HUNGRY TO HEAR
IN A CAFÉ
A Story About the Realness of Story Unrealness and the Unrealness of
Story Realness
AN ANONYMOUS BOOK
FROM Experts Are Puzzled, 1930
Stories That Make a Point of Going No Further Than They Go, This
Being Their Point
MADEMOISELLE COMET
THE FORTUNATE LIAR
MOLLY BARLEYWATER
BUTTERCUP
THE FABLE OF THE DICE
PERHAPS AN INDISCRETION
ARISTA MANUSCRIPT
THAT WORKSHOP
FINALE
A Later Story: CHRISTMASTIME (1966)
SOME STORIES IN REVIEW
SEQUEL OF 1964 TO 'A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY'
SEQUEL OF 1974 TO 'A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY'
(HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED)
ON 'IN THE BEGINNING'
ON 'EVE'S SIDE OF IT'
ON 'PRIVATENESS'
ON 'IN THE END'
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (1935)

IN stories are set down probable truths which are not demonstrably true:
stories are guesswork. They are guesswork either because their material is
entirely unimportant, so that it bears no more thorough treatment than
guesswork; or because their material, although somewhat important, is
burdened with unimportant elements which make it unripe, at least for the
present, for thorough treatment; or because their material is, as it were, so
precociously important that one can do no more than nurse high hopes for it
—hopes sobered with caution.
The first group of stories in this book deals with unequivocally unimportant
material. They are about lives as such; and all lives, as such, are
unimportant. All lives have happened long ago; or, at any rate, they are not
happening now, however immediate they may seem to the people who are
living them. And whatever is not happening now is unimportant; it is merely
curious. It is very difficult to let the unimportant remain unimportant; almost
impossible for most people who write stories, because it would sadden them
to feel that their work on the material did not make it more important. People
who write stories are so generous. I too am generous; but I am also
economical—I do not believe in wasting generosity. One can get all the
sensations of generosity, where it is improvident to be generous, in being
fair. With the material of the first group of stories I have been very fair. I
have done a certain amount of work on it, but no more than was enough to
establish it decently in its unimportance.
Why did I bother at all? Not because the material forced itself on me:
material does not force itself on a writer. A storyteller must, like a truth-
teller, make discoveries. The only difference between them is that the story-
teller must let his discoveries remain obscure, while the truth-teller must
make his discoveries plain. I have written these seven stories, then, for the
discipline which story-telling lays upon one's truth-telling instincts. My
function as a writer is not story-telling but truth- telling: to make things plain.
But some of the things that I have already made plain have seemed obscure to
people because I have sometimes made too much plain—more than most
people are capable of understanding. Which has not only been a waste of my
energy but a cause of irritation to the people who have not understood; so
that, in revenge, they have called my writing obscure. I do not like to waste
my energy or to irritate people or to be called obscure. And so I have really
written these stories of lives for the good of everyone. I have set myself the
task of discovering very obscure, or irrelevant, material, and done a
minimum amount of work on it. I do not mean these seven stories to seem
witty or pathetic or ingenious or naïve or dull. My only ambition for them
was that they should produce a certain relaxation of energy in myself and a
certain relaxation of hostility in those who read them with some previous
prejudice against my truth-telling technique. I have, so to speak, changed the
subject in telling them. Yet not really: there is only one subject, and it is
impossible to change it.
Perhaps those who have no familiarity with, or no especial hostility or
friendliness toward, my truth-telling activities will call them foolish stories,
or idle stories, or ill-written stories. All, certainly, will agree with me that
the material is obscure. Yet no one will call me obscure—least of all those
who are the first to call me obscure when my material is important, and
because their attention is not equal to the requirements. There is nothing that
pleases me so much as to have people agree with me, and nothing that
wearies me so much as to be made a scapegoat for the incapacity of people
to understand what they only pretend to want to know. This frank account of
the motivation of the first group of stories will, I hope, disarm any reader
who is tempted to look for some metaphysical catch in them because, as
stories written by me, they seem suspiciously simple ones. The other stories
in the book must be accounted for somewhat differently.
The two stories which compose the second group deal with material of
diluted importance; they are dilutions, and because they are dilutions they are
stories. They are stories of ideas. Suppose yourself a guest in a house where
your hostess is an energetic woman of wide interests. In such a house, in such
a universe, there are really no degrees of importance. At table no topic is
supposed to be discussed which is not in some way important. Yet,
undeniably, everything is discussed; and only a small part of all that is said is
true—that is, absolutely important. Your hostess is affectionate as well as
energetic. She appreciates your good intentions—she has made friends of you
because of your good intentions—and does not require that every word you
say at her table shall be gospel truth. Indeed, to show her confidence in you,
she absents herself a good deal from table, and leaves you most of the time to
yourselves, to talk as you please, feeling that you will not go very far wrong
in what you say, not wrong enough to make her ask herself why you should be
friends of hers at all.
 Thus most of the conversation which goes on is a mixture. It consists mostly
of stories of ideas which you tell one another. What you say has a general air
of importance, but any particular detail, if we stopped to examine it, would
seem insignificant and beside the point. Yet your minds move in the right
direction; we must not expect too much of them, exactly because they are still
moving. While they are still moving they may at any moment move backward
rather than forward. Your wisdom is on the whole pretty diluted. Your
hostess herself, when she talks with you, tries not to be a purist. She too says
many things which are merely stories of ideas. And for the moment this kind
of conversation will do. For the moment the story of Miss Banquett will do,
and the story of Lady Port-Huntlady. Why should they not, since we are such
a mixed company? Perhaps there are too many of us, perhaps a little later on
there will be fewer of us. At any rate our minds are still moving, and
backward as well as forward; the nearest we get to truth at any given moment
is, perhaps, only an idea—a dash of truth somewhat flavouring the
indeterminate substance of our minds.
You will notice that I speak of 'our' minds, not saying which one of these is
mine. For at this stage we are merely a mixed company; I have no right to
affirm that my mind is necessarily purer than yours, or that I am necessarily
the hostess. We are at the moment all together a mixed company, and that is
all there is to it. And our conversation at its most serious consists of stories
of ideas, stories like the ones I have told you about Miss Banquett and Lady
Port-Huntlady: these are the kind of stories which you, at your most serious,
tell me. And it cannot be otherwise with all of us together so.
We all know that in a little while, when there are not quite so many of us,
when we are not such a mixed company, we shall be able to talk to one
another in a more immediate way. There is much in our conversation that is
important, and Miss Banquett and Lady Port-Huntlady do justice to this; but
there is much also that is merely curious, and Miss Banquett and Lady Port-
Huntlady cannot gainsay this. Miss Banquett and Lady Port-Huntlady belong
to a mixed company. Miss Banquett may seem a more poetic, and therefore a
more flattering personification of ourselves than Lady Port-Huntlady; but this
is only because we shaped her when the conversation was in full swing, and
we are still disappointed that it was not going any better. Lady Port-Huntlady
suffers from the disadvantage of rising from among us (faded spirit) when the
conversation, as an ambitious intimacy between more of us than could
possibly last through to the end, has practically worn itself out. We are no
longer disappointed; we are indifferent to the obvious failure of the
conversation; we know that as we are we can never really say anything
absolutely important.
Even so, it has been very difficult to say as much as we have said. In the
very beginning, you will remember, I was opposed to half-measures. There
were altogether too many of you, and yet I said, 'There must be perfect
intimacy between us all, we must tell the exact truth to one another.' And
nothing happened, except that there were more and more of you. And I kept
waiting for someone to begin. I did not want to begin myself because I
wanted everyone to have his say before I began: I was polite as well as
optimistic. But as no one began, and nothing happened, except that there were
more and more of you, I grew very pessimistic. But as, also, I could not
sacrifice the situation to my fanatical scruples of courtesy, I eventually began
the conversation myself. And two things were bound to happen: the first, that
it would be a rather vague conversation, as it passed from one to the other;
the second, that the conversation would gradually wear itself out. Then, in a
little while, there would be just a few of us telling one another the exact truth.
So that I should not have to deal in half- measures, after all—although to get
to this point I might have to seem, for a time, to be dealing in half-measures.
We can distinguish then three stages in the history of stories, looking back
from where there is an end of all the loose talk between us—an end, sadly, of
stories. In the first stage (we now see) we were not even a mixed company,
we were not a company at all; there was no 'we.' There was nothing but
stories of lives. These went round from mouth to mouth—nobody's mouth in
particular. And it all happened long ago—at any rate, long before we began
coming together. It was all history, and none of it was important: that is, none
of it lasted. So I have told here a few stories of lives, by way of reminding
ourselves, myself, what the state of language was like before we began
talking together: how obscure. And this first stage went on until quite
recently. In fact, if you go out from our company at any moment into that
world of hearsay which went on until quite recently, you will still catch
fragments of this obscure language as it passed from mouth to mouth: for
always that which has been going on until quite recently goes on just a little
longer, and a little longer, so that it seems to have been going on just now.
Stories of lives belong to this 'just now'— when we had not really begun to
say anything to one another, when a 'we' could not really be said to exist.
There is a quaint cult of story-writing which practises what is called 'the
short story'; pompous little fragments in whose very triviality, obscurity and
shabbiness some significant principle of being is meant to be read. But this is
only the lazy jargon of those other ones who fancy themselves another 'we' to
us in their lazy pride of not submitting themselves to the rigours of our
tedious purification of language. With what a fatuous air of triumph they
round off these stories, just where, practically, they have begun. Well, we are
differently constituted. We had, first of all, to become this 'we' of theirs. But
then we had to go on. We had to leave the hearsay behind, without pomp, in
all its triviality, obscurity and shabbiness, and as tenderly as we could;
knowing that some of it would for a time cling to our tongues, until we should
no longer be a mixed company, until there would not be so many of us.
For a time, that is, we should be telling one another stories of ideas: not
altogether unimportant stories, since we were none of us lazy, yet not
altogether important, altogether true stories, since we were doing our best but
not the best. And we should be gradually feeling that our company was
thinning. We should begin to say, 'In a little while now.' Some of us would
have been saying this privately to ourselves all the time —Hans Andersen
among the first. You will see that at the end I have tried to reward his
patience, on behalf of us all, with a golden crown, a crown of real gold. For
the best time is made out of gold; and all the time that he kept saying to
himself 'In a little while now' was time of the very best quality. I will not say
that it was 'pure'—as I would agree with the alchemists that gold was not an
'element'; no time can be pure. But this was certainly a fast compound, as
jealous as gold of its integrity; of sulphurous patience and mercurial hope
and salty fear—let whatever else he made it of be his secret, as each of us
has endured by a private magic.
In the third group of stories we are everywhere saying to one another, 'In a
little while now.' There are, of course, not so many of us; we almost know
exactly who we all are. And what we say to one another is almost the truth. It
is indeed the truth except for what is missing. We have grown so careful that
we prefer to leave a great deal unsaid to saying a great deal only some of
which is true. Ever so carefully and ever so faintly we begin to tell one
another the truth—nothing but the truth. This seems to take us back to fairy
stories rather than forward to the truth; it seems saying so very little, giving
ourselves such poor measure. But fairy stories in all their scantiness
promised: 'Some time will come a time when in a little while all will be
plain.' Fairy stories in all their scantiness indeed gave poor measure, but for
fear of giving false measure. Indeed, we are now afraid of giving ourselves
false measure. Indeed, until we are quite sure that we are not telling one
another lies—not being exactly sure who we are—we prefer to tell one
another stories which are only nearly true.
This is how things must go when there are so many of us: for although we
are not so many as we were, we are still quite a lot. And where there are
quite a lot one has to be careful of accidents. Of course, there is another side
to this business of telling the truth, in which accidents cannot happen because
there is practically nothing besides truth itself involved—truth tells itself the
truth, and there are no accidents. This other side begins to come into action
when we begin trying to tell the truth to one another. Truth is trying to talk,
and each of us overhears something of what it is trying to say, and we tell
what we hear to the others. And what we hear is not hearsay, because we
hear it in ourselves, not in others. But even with hearing something in oneself
one has to be careful of accidents. We are not so many as we were, but we
are still quite a lot: how sure are we which is which? And a further difficulty
is that at the end what we tell one another must be exactly the same as what
truth tells itself—or it is not an end. We must speak practically as one person
—or it is no good. You know how you feel when a great many people are
holding a great many separate conversations all at the same time. You try to
think, 'What a nice party'; but you cannot help feeling dissatisfied. You know
it is really no good. And all the others feel in their hearts, 'No, it is no good.'
No, it is no good unless it is all the same conversation. In a little while it
will be all the same conversation. And all we can do about it, having got so
far, is to be careful of accidents.
And if you do not understand me, if we do not understand one another, then
is it not all as I have said? For will you not then be as much as saying to
yourselves, 'No, it is no good unless it is all the same conversation? No, it is
not that I am difficult to understand, but that I do so want us all to speak the
same conversation; I insist on our all speaking the same conversation. And
will those who are incapable of this please, please go away now, if you have
not already gone away. Some of you who should have gone away long ago
will say like a flash, 'Oh, of course, by the "same" conversation she means
her conversation.' Which is certainly very childish. Here is a whole book
that took a long time to write and to make into a book, and all done so
carefully and so nicely, and yet is there a single paragraph at which you can
sneer 'Oh, she is talking about herself'? And in everything that I have ever
written have I ever brought myself in, except in the most discreet way? And I
suppose you (who should have gone away long ago) will say to that, 'Yes,
she is always so secretive, always ready to talk about everybody but herself.'
Which is certainly very, very childish.
And I do hope that those of you who should not have gone away long ago
will get just a little pleasure out of these stories, as I got just a little pleasure
out of writing them. I do not expect you to get a great deal of pleasure,
because that can be got only from the truth itself, and even then we have to be
careful that we are not fooling ourselves, that we haven't made full measure
(full pleasure) mean altogether too large a party. Starting at the beginning,
you will probably not get much pleasure out of the first stories: do not be
ashamed to admit it, I did not mean you to. But as you go on you will perhaps
get just a little more, and just a little more pleasure, till we come to the last
story, a last lesson in geography, where we will leave the whole matter
hanging for just a little while until we know more exactly where we are (who
we are). And then, while we are waiting (for just a little while) to know
more exactly where we are (who we are), we shall talk about Hans Andersen
(for just a little while). We shall try to make him feel at home at the party
where all the conversation is gradually becoming the same conversation; for
you know how self-conscious modesty makes people—we must all become
rather proud, behave rather as if we were each in his or her own way rather
important. Some of us may indeed be a little more important, but none of us
has been so patient as he, made such a little while of such a long while. And
it will be pleasant for him, for he will have a golden crown, a crown of real
gold; and it will be pleasant for us, for the crown will be a token that in a
little while it will really be all the same conversation. Until when we shall,
perhaps, tell one another just a few more stories—to show that we are not
worried.
L.R.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1982)

1
WHAT can I write prefatorily for this new edition of Progress of Stories—the
first edition was published forty-six years ago—that will relieve its
appearance in a new time of an effect as of an honorific unveiling of
antiquities, while clarifying the impulses that moved me to make it the book
that it was? I believe that it is blessed with the gift of scrupulous
unhurriedness—every moment of it a full moment's worth of telling- time—
that is the essential spirit of story-progress: the gift not of my authorial
giving, but what it is given a telling of stories to be when nothing but the
telling of them, no least ulterior purpose of a telling, is allowed to lead the
way, surreptitiously or otherwise. That what was told in the book's stories
was ready to be told, had a verisimilitude in itself as that which came to
mind to me for telling, should be palpable in present reading-contact with it.
Does not everything hold together of itself, each story-length possessed of an
inner reasonableness of step-by-step narrative consecution, what it becomes
as whole welling out of what was incipiently accumulated for progress to a
finish? I am counting on the original material to exhibit its intrinsic
naturalness as story-content—on its needing no special justification in its
reappearance as entitled to perennial interest as material of art. The
initiating impulses from which the stories issued were not impulses of art,
not impulses to construct stories but to tell stories.
Stories that are products of art can only provide literary experience—
experiences of managed imagination. Stories that are products of nature—of
human nature as against human art —fill the mind's vacancies in its
conception of the possibilities of personal life, as physical nature has
experimented in variations in living forms to the kind and number that
vacancies in biological possibility have invited. Products of art are things in
excess of that which has natural and necessary presence among us. But what
are stories that are not products of art? What kind of critical water can the
classification 'products of nature', 'nature' understood as human nature, hold?
Let us allow that it is a water free of the impurities of classificatory
terminology: stories that are products of nature, that come naturally to the
mind for telling, reflecting the infinite progression of circumstances in which
the reality of live being consolidates itself reiteratively, mirroring to the
mind its own live reality. I view the stories presented here—including the
early stories I have added, to form a new part—as written upon a natural
premise of the mind (the mind one has by nature as a being of mind) that life
is all happening: it makes itself into a story, stories, it begins and ends as a
story, or is a continuous story, or a world of stories. The story-way of
speaking, of the mind's telling what comes to it as within the possibilities of
the reasonably thinkable, what 'makes sense', has a step-by- step
connectedness with itself in all that happens in it with an effect of life-
likeness (of the experienceable, if not of the experienced), is the natural
model for all telling of the true— what the mind knows to be happening or to
have happened, knows to be so, as it tells it.
 It can be perceived from how I am writing here in this new, later preface
that my view of the nature of story-telling and of the nature of truth-telling as
being closely related has not altered in the time intervening between the two
prefaces. But I have, in that time, applied myself with increasing
attentiveness to the possibilities of truth as ultimately resolvable by the
measure of the linguistic possibilities of truth, the mind's truth-telling will
being unquestionable. I shall dwell a little here on this matter of truth to bring
readers of the new edition into intimate range of my long-sustained devotion
to story and truth as linguistically, and in all the poignantly human aspects of
intellectuality and emotionality, poignantly kindred.
Truth can be the story the mind tells of itself: of the course of happening
within its personal thought-compass. Or it can be the story of the mind's
experience not just of consciousness of the course of its thought but of the
course of the knowable beyond the bounds of the mind's understanding
acquaintance with itself as the being—the being of mind—it personally
constitutes. Thus the story-telling model of human speaking, or, as speaking
recorded for silent apprehending is literarily named, 'writing', persists, in its
natural casting of speaking or writing as reduplicating the live processes of
happening, into the open areas of knowledge and understanding that all minds
share as the world of intelligent being—partaking, in their unitary reality as
minds, of the identity of mind. This mind of unparticular identity is the motive
force of consciousness of itself that turns being into an ever-expanding, ever-
contracting universe of infinitesimally infinite probing of the truth of itself.
Our minds, which we call 'human', give mind—mind unparticular—earth-
place for the universal story of being it has to tell. We become, as minds,
propitious points of departure for and return from experience of the universal
content of being, the exploring of what—of everything having being in some
particular guise within this compass—manifests a connectedness of
consciousness-like mutuality, in its happening as itself, responsively inter-
occurrent between it and being of other particular guises. We know ourselves
as truth-concerned beings. And the telling of truth becomes our minds'
foresense of our minds' full possible and, truth told, the meaning that our
lives will have as the lives of beings realizing the possibilities of being to
their universal full.
The secret of Progress of Stories was, and remains (for, though I am about
to tell it, the confidence will be treated as a whimsical confiding of what
cannot be publicly confided—as indeed it was treated in its first edition,
where I told it in the preface, as I am about to do here) the delight that can be
felt in the good fortune that, if for this or that reason there can be no telling of
truth at that or this time, there can be telling of a story or stories that, though
told as not being and known not to be truth, flush the expanded word-scenery
of the mind with a truth-like radiance. In the telling or in the attending to the
telling of a story or stories, all the faculties of the mind suited to employment
in the telling of truth can exercise themselves in a joyful freedom of trial of
their powers of timing of thinkable happening and the wording of it in
promptitudes of matching moments in progress. The progress is only story-
progress, but the feel of the progress is precious to the mind, helps the mind
to feel its beat: I am tempted to say 'heartbeat', with thought of how the Latin
cor, meaning 'heart', had considerable use, lexicographically described as
'figurative', as meaning also 'soul, mind'. A mind surely has a beat, a beat of
what I should prefer to call, to calling it thought-progress, meaning-progress.
And that delight which I have described as, for me, the essence of the love of
stories, takes its course along the story-path, mounting as the story-meaning
mounts in progress-beat.
The account I have been giving of my understanding of the nature of the
story has brought to naming-point a quality of the story that inheres in it, I
think, as its crucial justification. The characterization seems to me the
touchstone of the necessary naturalness that a story's makeup should have as a
course of happenings told with an immediate presence to them of narrating
words. The words should precipitate in the mind consciousness of the nature
of truth, though the actuality of the told is not true, rather, an accidental
course of thought that has timed itself to the narrative proprieties of truth. The
effect—the name of the quality—is heart-breaking. Truth, experienced as a
quality of what is told, is not heart-breaking but mind-purifying, disburdening
thought of the weight of the unknown or the ill-understood. Truth lightens the
mind of its controlled uneasiness in consciousness of ignorance and
understanding-failure (no sane, naturally functioning mind can disburden
itself at will of such consciousness). Truth does not delight: it heals the mind
of ills borne in it, kept to the possible least in interference with its natural
course of thought- happening—it lifts it up from bends in it of unfulfilled
mind- capability, dragging, weighty emptiness of incomprehension. The
satisfaction a story yields, that stories yield, is that of the passingly sweet
flavor of knowledge of what might be. It is heart-breakingly real to the mind
as experience of what might be—the mind loves the experience not as it
loves truth, but as it loves itself, the beat in it of the sense of truth as the
ultimate in knowledge and understanding, of the beat of its life as mind.
The stories that make up the original Progress of Stories represent, in that
combination, an important personal factor in my life's work, which I should
like to be regarded at the least as work concerning the telling, in the terms of
human consciousness, of all that is to tell of the being of things and beings.
But only an important personal factor. Although I wrote other stories up to
the time of the first publication of this book, and much indeed of story sort in
later time, the other story-writing does not as a whole have the degree of
purity in the quality of soul- (or mind- or heart-) sweetening medicinality that
these stories have—for who, as I conceive human sensibility, love truth, and
all that gives itself the shape of truth, for passing kindness to the mind, to
minds. These I regard, that is, as especially having a simply imbibable virtue
of private comfort-giving to minds that are not primarily preoccupied with
their private condition, but primarily or entirely preoccupied with their
condition as places in the total mind- compass of being in which and from
which truth gathers into speakability. They were solace to me in the period,
of less than a decade, of their writing, in which what was the cosmically
important (or the humanly general important, which is the same thing!) in my
preoccupations of mind was mounting to my progressive best of definition as
naturally all-preoccupying matter of all minds. They were, they are, of no
importance for me, or for others, except as little, mortal, interims of solace in
the undying trial of mind for the telling of being—the telling of the true story
of being, that succeeds as a telling of the very 'thing', being, the 'thing' brought
into presence, in the telling, in its living, its very, reality.
The stories that I am adding as supplements to the original collection, of the
same writing-period, have all more in them of the truth-concern insistencies
of the verbally active mind, but much less of this than is to be found in my
later story writing. In the later, the force of anticipation of truth, as the
necessary identity-character of all writing (indeed of all speaking) not
destined for burial in the mortuary archives of the make-believe important,
points the mind, minds, towards a truth-ultimate while stressing the
actualities of our falling short of it in our working life of mind, or minds. The
happy medium of satisfaction (which I have called 'delight') in the mere
incidental, inconsequential exercise of the faculties of the mind directed
towards a truth-ultimate is considerably overshadowed in the later story-
writing by intellectual solemnities of appreciation of the verging of the story-
telling upon the borders of truth. I am thinking in particular of A Trojan
Ending, a novel of 1937, and Lives of Wives, a book of stories of 1939, both
of historical subject-matter.
I am including in the supplementary additions to the original early
storybook a single story of later, much later, writing (of the sixties). I was
moved to write it as a little end- of-year Christmas gift for a few friends, and
I have since made a few presentations of it. In none of the responses that I
received was there any manifestation of the story's having for the recipient
the quality I have described as, in my experience as a writer and reader of
stories, a reader and writer of stories, the constitutional and spiritual essence
of story-nature. I had written the story with the weight upon my
consciousness of the compulsive appeal to rejoicings exerted upon people by
the Christmastime and end-of-year gathering of time into a knot of challenge
to their day-on-day judgement of their lives as worth the living of them.
There was no movement in the story towards an arrival at the truth of the
matter. I was possessed only, in the telling, of the sense of a pattern of
movement, of a rhythmic beat of consciousness of how 'things' happen,
corresponding to the immediately environing flow of human behavior
evidently directed by a common impulsion (which reverberated in my own
mind, as in the minds of all the others in whose company I was by time's
ever-abrupt, continuously only momentary, all-inclusiveness). The kind of
truth the story had, has, is altogether substanceless. To me it is of the
heartbreaking (in the sense of this I have expounded) quality that must inhere
in a story for it to be a story truly. Nothing in it is true!—but what is told
takes the mind nevertheless into the heart of the ultimate necessity: that all
must 'in the end' be told. Every story's ending—be it truly a story—strikes the
note of the finality-beat of this necessity.
In including the little story 'Christmastime' in this book as an appropriate
addition, though it is of over twenty-five years later vintage than any of the
original or any of the added stories, I am acting under the persuasion of its
having an outstanding purity of story-motivation. Perhaps its possessing this
character (my persuasion being justified) and that of its failing to be heart-
touching to the minds of the persons to whom I presented it are knit together
in a single explanation. Can the case not be that, although the book in its
original edition made only a little stir in the hearts of reading minds of the
time, its heart-mind stirring potency subsiding in the later periods to the
value of a 'neglected book' for citing as such by persons solicited as having
an eye for revivable literary curiosities, the motivation-innocence that
informed the stories endured in private survival in myself, no stranger amidst
the truth-telling motivations that took over, for the most part, the site of
preoccupation in my mind? While, in the decades between the thirties (the
decade of general dissolution of faith in the future) and the current decades,
which, for those who think of themselves as replacing lost hope with
intelligently limited expectations, inaugurate an era of enlightened cynicism,
innocence has come to seem an intellectually unwholesome state of mind,
even for engagement in a private pleasure of telling, or spelling out to oneself
the telling of, a might-be or might-have-been in a truth-like pattern of
inevitable sequentiality?
The late story, the original ones, the added ones, have all the same kind of
worth of perdurable unimportantness. They are dispensable, there is no
important need of them; but, given survival by circumstance's impartiality of
choice between the important and the unimportant, they confer the kind of
blessing our patience with ourselves can honorably confer on the lesser
engagements of our minds for which greater ones are put off (for the sake of
allowing our minds to acquit themselves of their necessities of
accomplishment in the freedom of an order determined by natural impulse).
Stories have important unimportant uses for our mind, in relation to the uses
that more important forms of consciousness-engagement have for them.
I ought not omit from the account of my story-writing a number of stories of
the early thirties left in manuscript form with much else of my papers and
work-properties, when I was forced to flee from Mallorca at the start of the
Spanish Civil War—all this coming into other hands, lost to me except for a
very small portion come back to me much later by a gracious stroke of
chance. One of the recovered stories, 'Description of Life', was recently
published in a limited edition. It is a lonely slice-of-life figment expressive
of my sense of the time of how much of what could be told of human life was
lost in being regarded as having only a random interest as self-limited
oddments of private life. I have done no story-writing since I wrote
'Christmastime' except for a lengthy trial in very recent years of the
possibility of a legend in which universal principles are given personal
identities, and the course of their interaction in immediate modern time is
told as a story of all-human happening-reference and meaning-orientation. It
has lain uncompleted for many months, presenting difficulties that may be too
real for resolution within a story—by the story-wit that puts unresolvable
difficulties to story-time eternal rest.
I have been for long intensively preoccupied with the problem of the telling
of what belongs to the story that is no exercise in telling resemblant
suppositionally of truth told, but a story transcending the unrealness of the
happening- content of all stories. This is the one-story that nullifies need of
the intermediation of stories between human yearning for truth and the
failures of human consciousness to sustain the mind in uninterrupted
operation of the faculties that enact its function of truth. The theme of the one-
story is adumbrated in the preface to the first edition of this book.
 A little more as to 'Christmastime'! Just the other day I made a fresh
presentation of the story to a pair of friends, and there came swiftly—the first
ever!—a response of pleasure felt. Have times been changing? I have seen no
signs of this. But two, and myself for a starter, project a line of possibility of
infinite extension. Here we have a story burgeoning from the story of a story,
and can leave the matter as being, happily, on a progressive course of
determination of its own.

2
I must confess that I deliver this book with some misgiving as to the chances
of its being read to an appreciable extent with a spirit matching the spirit of
its writing and that I am of uncertain confidence even as to the pleasure with
which it or parts of it will probably be read by some. These stories have
integral belonging to my writings as a whole. But there has been little hearty
response to my writings as a whole, and in some quarters the reception of
them has been distinctly surly. Indeed, not many readers are likely to have
more than a slight acquaintance with them, in the whole or in any
considerable part. The intent inspiring them is not one of the characteristic
writing motivations of the age—it is a rara avis among them. The stories do
not preach their spirit or their point; and what I wrote in the first preface as
to the principle behind them was vulnerable to being passed over as doting
authorial rhetoric. What I write here prefatorily of the unmistakably serious
can invite passing over as incongruous with a body of stories in which the
touch of significance or sentiment is firmly kept a light one. Moreover,
prefaces are easily regarded by readers as ceremonial encumbrances, to be
read sometime, perhaps, or left unread with impunity as to the effect on
reading enjoyment or profit. The republication of Progress of Stories cannot
but have an effect of disconnecting it from the background of general meaning
against which all my work is written, the other components of it being
clouded in vague or ill-formed impressions. This meaning-accompaniment
has presence in all the components—in some, very explicit presence; in
Progress of Stories it is everywhere actively implicit.
The case is not that I begrudge pleasure-taking in the stories, but that the
pleasure that I took in writing them, and that I hoped they would excite in the
reading of them, was pleasure of an order related to the unities of human
concern that I describe in the original preface as resting on the principle that
(ultimately) there is only one subject, a subject impossible to change—or,
using there also a different figure for a unified consideration of things, the
principle that (ultimately) all conversation is all the same conversation. I
have already indicated here that story-telling is for me the sympathetic
pleasure- counterpart of truth-telling—a version of it at low-intensity
appreciation of the necessity of an (ultimate) all-serious unity of concerns
exercised in our telling one another what I have named the one-story to tell
which is the total all-to-tell—the all-story, truth.
The one-story naming is an old naming of mine, begun in days anteceding
the first publication of this book. It has happened that the name, the phrase,
the conception, was in time seized upon by a greedy poet, for purposes not at
all related to the matter of truth-telling, and used with a showy rhetorical
effect that left a lingering impression. I am not uneasy about the possibility of
challenge of my patent-title to the name. I am uneasy about the disposition to
stories in the general human atmosphere of reading-expectation. The absence
of the very conception 'truth' from the contemporary lists of the intellectually
and morally useful conceptions has converted stories, and novels, into areas
of intellectually and morally sophisticated reading-recreation in which
pleasure itself becomes a ball losing its bounce in its being batted on from
page to page, in each storybook. I recommend my one-story conception as an
antidote to inclination to convert this book into such a recreation-area.
Do not, I beg of you, fall into liking any particular one or ones of these
stories—or all together—too much. They neither will nor can do you any
good but (if you let them do what good they can) that of stirring you to feel
hungrily the void that all stories leave, which can be filled only by the story
of us all, the compacted story of everything. Where to look for this story? It
hangs—according to what I have learned from my experience—in the
cupboard in our minds that all are afraid to look into, or, at any rate, to open
wide—afraid for no good reasons, probably. I have tried to do some opening
of mine, to wide (as in a little book The Telling, published thirty-seven years
after Progress of Stories). But this is not a story for a single author's telling.
And, should all come to engage in the telling of it, what is thus told could be
no more than a self-confounding miscellany of near-truths unless every telling
of it had the ring of truth, the ring of what is in truth all the same telling. I use
this occasion as an appropriate one on which to offer a little account of my
vision of what the fascination of stories, and the irresistible impulsion of
some to tell them, is 'all about'. For a prefatory parting word to those
launching themselves upon this book's course, in its new availability, I have
kept a warning counsel that contains, as might a box of travel-aids for
emergency-use, something to serve for cheer at the journey's safe completion.
 Even in the youth of its existence, Progress of Stories was not an idyll of
refuge from the harassments of self-accusations that haunt us in our knowing
what we do not do, and are not being. It did not confer innocence, or bestow
congratulations on innocence, forgive us for what we ought not to be
forgiven. Along with having the measure of the ultimate, the book had, in its
hospitable serenity, the measure of us—of the repetitive again and again
immediately less than the ultimate right us. There was no laxity in it of
softened judgement to look back to nostalgically. All the indulgences of us in
it looked forward. We have gone a little forward from the book's first time, in
the age-count of our matching and not matching of ourselves to what we ought
to be, by all we know of the right and the wrong of things. The historical
dates of this ageing reveal only the length of the time-progression from being
nothing but our loosely assembled right-wrong, wrong-right, selves towards
nothing ahead but a balance-sheet kept by us, with prognosticate discretion,
continuously unsummarized. I make bold to suggest that the encounter
between Progress of Stories and its readers of these times, given full scope
as an occurrence of contemporary relevance, could produce some
illumination of the spiritual date of us.
L.(R.)J.
THE STORIES OF THE FIRST EDITION

I: Stories of Lives

SOCIALIST PLEASURES

FANNY'S father was a Socialist. It was a town of fifteen thousand people,

about a hundred of whom were Socialists, and her father had organized these
into a Socialist Party. They rented an empty shop in a part of the town where
rents were cheap, and the name was printed on the window in red with the
arm and torch under it. Every month there was a box- picnic. Each family
contributed a shoe-box full of hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches, and the
boxes were sold at the picnic, care being taken that no family got its own box
back again. The chance of getting better or worse than one's own box caused
much joking and repartee between the families. The box-picnic was an
important Socialist pleasure.
Another Socialist pleasure was winning arguments. Her father always had
arguments with the men who came into their shop to buy the Capitalist
newspapers and magazines. They were mostly Union men who worked in the
clothes factories. It was possible to have arguments with them because
people who worked on clothes were always intelligent, her father said. But
her father always won the arguments. Socialists always won arguments.
Union men were nearly Socialists and that made the arguments more
interesting. They went on buying the Capitalist papers, and this was good for
business.
"They have to pay me for their stupidity," her father would say. That was fun.
Fanny had a cat that she called Jenny. Jenny used to come into her bed at
night and crawl under the covers. If Fanny moved, Jenny would bite her legs
unkindly. She was a sad black cat with wild ways. When Fanny went to
school in the mornings, Jenny would cry after her a little, but not much. The
only really positive thing about Jenny was that she was a sad cat; though she
had, indeed, wild moments. Fanny's mother used to say, "The way she looks
up at you, even when she has had enough to eat, it would make your heart
break." Fanny privately called her Jenny Heartbreak. Fanny herself would
not have dared to feel sad about anything; sadness was not Socialistic. All
Jenny's kittens were killed as soon as they were born; this may have been the
cause of her sadness. But no one, least of all Fanny, wished her to be any
different. Fanny and her mother and father saw everything as facts; and all
facts were the inevitable result of economic determinism, no matter what
kind of facts they were.
Fanny did not allow herself to be too fond of Jenny. Cats were not a
Socialist pleasure. Fanny's family was a Jewish family, but they did not live
as Jews lived or think of themselves as Jews. They were Socialists. Still,
whatever was not Socialist was Christian. Cats were a Christian pleasure.
She would tell her father and mother about the fun she had teaching her
schoolmates politics and religion, but she never showed any enthusiasm over
her cat. Nor did she talk to her schoolmates about her cat; that would not
have been Socialistic.
Another private pleasure of Fanny's that was not Socialistic was Mansion
Road. It was the only street in the town with a slope. It sloped very little, yet
enough to hide itself from sight after the first few hundred yards. Fanny
passed it every morning when, going to school, she had to walk out of her
way to deliver several morning papers. There were no houses in Mansion
Road itself. It was not quite a street yet, in fact. Fanny had no cause to walk
up Mansion Road, and she did not approve of doing things without cause. But
at night she often had wide-awake dreams about walking up Mansion Road,
and what would happen. One of the things that Mansion Road made her
dream of was wearing ear-rings. Some Jewish girls had holes in their ears
and wore ear-rings, but she was a Socialist girl. Spanish girls in pictures
also had holes in their ears with long ear-rings in them, but they were
Catholics. Spanish girls went to bull-fights in fringed shawls. Pictures like
this came out of Mansion Road, from beyond where one could see, when she
dreamt herself to sleep at night.
Fanny won scholarships and went to a university, and in time became a
professional psychologist. She worked in a government statistical bureau.
Her job was to make studies of the kinds of books, films, theatres, games and
sports that different kinds of people seemed to enjoy most, and to write
reports that would be useful to Education. Psychology was the personal side
of Socialism. It showed how Capitalism stimulated pleasures that did not
really make people happy. Thus the people who spent most energy on having
a good time were the least happy. Capitalistic display, not personal
satisfaction, was their object. Of course, she could not point this out in her
reports, since she was working for a Capitalistic government. But she could
at least make the statistics show that people's pleasures had nothing to do
with their real life. She loved her work. In her letters to her father she quoted
interesting statistics. He was very proud of her.
Her colleagues and friends were all Socialists in one form or another; that
is, they were scientists. She shared a flat with a woman who studied the
mental disorders of professional entertainers, from circus people to
musicians. This woman's theory was that entertainers were the victims of the
public. She believed in community entertainment and enlisted Fanny's help in
organizing social groups in which entertainment should be a co-operative act.
The only apparent survival of Fanny's childhood weakness for pleasures
that were not Socialistic was a passion for having herself photographed in
exotic costumes. She had many such photographs hidden away, which she
sometimes took out to look at when she suffered from melancholy and could
not sleep. In some of her photographs she wore ear-rings. She had never had
holes made in her ears, but she bought ear-rings that could be screwed on.
One summer Fanny went to Spain with the woman with whom she shared
her flat. It was hot, but Fanny's friend took many notes. They went to bull-
fights. Her friend was interested in the psychology of the bull-fighters. Fanny
liked the bull-fights themselves. They were one of the things that had
happened along Mansion Road. Then a poisonous lizard bit Fanny on the
back of her neck and she had to go to hospital. Her friend went home, leaving
her behind. It rarely happened that lizards were poisonous or that they bit
people. Fanny was secretly glad that it had happened to her. It had a
weakening effect on the blood and the whole constitution. The Sisters treated
her like a child. She would kiss their heavy crosses. She felt so confused. It
did not count. She was very weak. The doctors seemed worried about her, as
if her mind had been affected. It was quite true that although the bite itself
soon healed she didn't want to get up or think about doing anything. Finally
she had to go because her bed was needed. She got leave to stay in Spain
until she should feel well enough to come back to her work. She took a house
and engaged a maid who laughed a lot about nothing. She found a black cat
and called it Jenny; it wasn't quite so sad as the old Jenny, which pleased her.
In Spain Christian pleasures were almost the same as Socialist pleasures.
People spent their spare time and energies in ways that did not make them
forget the kind of people they were. They had a low opinion of themselves,
and were proud that they were broad-minded enough to have it. That was a
very Socialistic way of thinking. Spaniards also won all their arguments.
Social occasions in Spain resembled dignified box-picnics. The playful and
the serious sides of life did not contradict each other.
And so it happened that Fanny had holes made in her ears and wore ear-
rings. She also learned to dance Spanish dances. When her leave was up she
went home, but instead of taking up her old work again she opened a School
of the Dance. In the School she was known as 'Conchita' and wore ear-rings
and a fringed shawl. She did not renew relations with her old friends and
colleagues. But the school was not a success—perhaps because it was a
Capitalist venture, or perhaps because it was a Socialist venture. Fanny did
not know. She decided that she would let things take their course. This was
good Socialism —even better Socialism than consistent action. Consistent
action was impossible in bourgeois phases of history. Thus people could not
understand how Socialists could be Capitalists for the time being.
Fanny got a job in a cabaret called 'The Universe'. Besides herself there
was a real negro, and an Armenian Jew dressed like a Russian Cossack, and
a real Japanese girl; Fanny was supposed to represent a Spanish girl. They
had to dance with the guests and improvise solo dances when no one wanted
to dance with them. Fanny lied to the proprietor, saying that she was Spanish.
She got better pay for being really Spanish. She felt Spanish in her
philosophy. One night she had to dance with a real Spaniard. She confessed
to him that she was not Spanish and begged him not to let the proprietor
know.
"I won't," he said, "but you must tell me what you are. You are something."
"Why, I suppose I'm a Socialist pleasure-girl," she answered.
When Fanny got too old to be a pleasure-girl, she went back to her parents.
They took a rational view of her peculiarities. "When she was a child she
was always thinking," her mother said. "Now that she is grown-up she is like
a child." Her father now owned a large, prosperous stationer's shop. He was
no longer a Socialist: he was a Communist. Being a Communist meant
knowing more definitely what went on in Soviet Russia than what went on in
other parts of the world. There were no more arguments. All the arguments
had been won—by Soviet Russia. Fanny was distressed to find her father so
contented. He had got fat and sophisticated and now read books that in the
old days he would have called Capitalistic Opium. Fanny felt herself old-
fashioned beside him.
Mansion Road was really a street now. Fanny's father and mother had built
themselves a house there, over the slope. But Fanny was resolved not to let
her soul become infected with the insidious poison of Communist
sophistication. She organized a club of not-young, not-old women who did
not feel that their lives were over, though they were over. They rented a
clubroom over a perfumery; the air was always scented, like a lonely
ballroom after a party. They called themselves 'The Socialists'. No one
seemed to mind or to think of them as a political organization. They used the
arm and torch as their society emblem and as a crest on their notepaper. At
their weekly meetings they discussed themselves and tried to discover new
fields of emotional experience. Fanny gave a talk on the Spanish philosophy
of life. The Spanish, she said, were a pessimistic people, and yet they
vibrated. They were an old people, and yet they were not tired. It was not a
matter of hope but of technique. One had to be both sane and insane, unhappy
and happy. It was painful to be alive.
Every month they gave an entertainment for people who they were sure
would not laugh at them. The members were supposed to dress and act
according to their least sane instincts. Fanny, of course, always wore ear-
rings and a fringed shawl and did Spanish dances. She was considered a
successful example of Socialist technique. Other members sometimes
behaved hysterically. Whenever a member made them feel ashamed of
themselves they asked her to resign; many people had no need of emotional
exercise. After each member had played her part and the vibrations had
calmed down, dainty suppers in boxes were auctioned off, the proceeds
going to a fund for establishing Socialist pleasure-centres in other towns.

THE FRIENDLY ONE

IN a little village in a foreign country a boyish-looking German, about forty
years old, settled down to live for the rest of his life. His name was Hermann
Vogel, but the villagers called him the Friendly One because he made friends
with them, and with other foreigners who came to the village to live, faster
than people usually make friends. He wandered into their houses absent-
mindedly (as it seemed) and passed the time of day with them when they had
time of day to pass; so there was nothing to do but make the best of him and
call him the Friendly One. He said that he was a writer of books for children,
yet he took no interest in children, nor had any one ever seen him at work.
But there was certainly something childish in the way he took their favours
for granted without ever thinking to return them. He walked with a light step,
his thin hair was always brushed carefully back over his round head, so that
no baldness showed, his features were small, his voice sometimes very high.
With foreigners, of course, he had to exert himself more. His way with them
was to ask their opinion on every possible subject with his head turned
towards them, then to turn his head away to reflect on their answers, then to
turn his head towards them again, saying quietly, "Yes, you are right." No one
was very fond of him, no one disliked him. He was merely the Friendly One
—though it could not actually be said of him that he was a friendly fellow.
There came to this village from abroad an American family consisting of a
stout young wife, a tall joking husband, a bad- tempered, unfriendly elder
brother of the wife, and three dogs. The Friendly One introduced himself to
them as a writer of books for children, and the wife and the husband confided
to him that they had three dogs because they had no children. They were fine
lively dogs, and during the first fortnight they did much damage to hens,
goats, cats and other dogs—before they began to feel themselves accepted as
official members of the village population, in spite of their faults.
"They always behave like this when we come to a new place," the wife and
husband said. "It makes people treat us as natives instead of as strangers.
They come and complain to us, and we tell them that the dogs will soon settle
down, and they and we together wait for the dogs to settle down." The
Friendly One turned his head from one side to the other and laughed along
with them, while the bad-tempered brother sat apart with a book in his lap
that he never really read, snorting at the dogs, at his sister, at her husband,
and at the Friendly One most of all.
"My brother," his sister apologized for him, "once fell in love with a
Finnish lady who turned out to be mad, and ever since he has been cross as a
cook."
 "Yes," joked her husband, "Helen's brother is our household background.
We take him everywhere with us, like the dogs, and he makes the shabbiest
furnished houses seem like home. His gloominess absorbs all the cups
without handles, and the uncomfortable chairs, and the useless rooms."
"Ha, ha ha," tittered Hermann, "so it is."
Hermann lodged with a village household, the eldest girl of which went as
a servant to the American family. She was sixteen, and strong and pretty, and
she liked to make eyes at men and then play angry when they came near her.
The three dogs adored her, and long after they had settled down she kept
putting them up to tricks. Most of all she liked teasing Hermann. "At him!"
she would say to the dogs whenever he came, and they would run at him and
growl round him throughout his visit. This gave the bad-tempered brother
much pleasure, and the wife and husband thought her a jolly girl. The
Friendly One had to take it all in fun, but it made him unhappy.
On Sunday afternoons, when the girl was at home, he would timidly tease
her before the father and mother, saying, "Ah, she won't leave me in peace,
that girl." So one Sunday afternoon the father said, "Good! Then marry her!"
The Friendly One could not tell whether the father was fooling or not. He
smiled nervously and asked, "Seriously, seriously?" At this everyone present
laughed noisily, except the girl herself, who looked angry. He could not tell
one way or the other, so he went on smiling until they stopped noticing him.
Then he slipped away and paid several visits, but the incident worried him.
He wanted to marry, but someone rich and someone who would respect him.
Whenever he met a rich, unattached American lady he would give her a copy
of a book he had written long ago called The Army of Children. It was a
story about how an army of children conquered the world, and what they did
to it. He only gave his book to women who, he thought, might possibly marry
him, or to people who could not read German: he did not want his idea to be
stolen. Already several writers had stolen his idea, though originally not
many copies of his book had been printed, nor had many been sold.
The girl had never seen his book. She did not even think of him as a writer.
And she was a poor girl, though she would have her grandmother's house
when she married. All the rest of that day his mind was in disorder. Suppose
they expected him to marry the girl? He did not want to seem unfriendly.
What a pity the bad-tempered brother was not a woman. At any rate he must
make an effort to be nicer to him. He would give him a copy of his book, to-
morrow. He would go to bed early. But he slept badly.
The next day he visited the American family, his book under his arm. The
girl did not set the dogs on him. He noticed that she was making eyes
furiously at the bad-tempered brother and that the bad-tempered brother was
not so bad-tempered as usual. An unpleasant feeling of rivalry with the girl
over the brother started up in him. He gave the brother his book, the brother
accepted it not at all unamicably, the three dogs kept bringing him things to
toss to them, and the wife and husband treated him like a fourth dog. But the
girl glared at him. He felt very excited and went away with flushed cheeks.
The following afternoon the brother took a long walk with him and told him
the story of the mad Finnish lady. "But that is all over now," he said
triumphantly. "I am going to marry the girl, though my sister and her husband
don't know it."
When the Friendly One heard this something happened to him. He did not
want the brother to marry the girl. The brother seemed to stand for the rich
American lady that he had always wanted to marry but had never found. Then
there was the girl. He would have liked to marry her, she was young and
strong and pretty. But she had only her grandmother's house, and besides he
did not see how he could offer her a copy of his book. He tried to explain
these things to the brother, but the words chattered between his teeth. He
wanted to say something that the brother would understand without being
offended, but it frightened him to have a point of view of his own. And, after
all, what was his point of view? He stood still and trembled. English was a
cruel language.
"Are you cold?" asked the brother kindly. The sun had indeed sunk behind
the mountain already, it being still only late winter—yes, he was cold.
"Yes, I am cold," he almost shouted. He was cold. He began to run. The
brother would not run after him, he was not a leggy man. The Friendly One
was not a leggy man, but he thought of himself now as a child who was cold,
or caught in a situation beyond his age. There was something he didn't like.
Could it be that he didn't like being himself? He ran harder. He reached the
schoolhouse. The children had just been dismissed. They saw him approach
and shrieked round him as he tried to run past them. He was not himself any
more. They ran after him.
"The Friendly One is making sport," the villagers cried to one another, and
a few of them joined the children behind him to discover what he was about.
Where should he take them? The girl! The dogs! He was not himself any
more. He was an army of children conquering the world. The world was the
girl and the dogs. The girl! The dogs!
His army stormed the house of the American family. The wife and husband
were not at home. The girl was in the kitchen with the dogs. The fire was
low, she must make it up for supper. One day the postman had found her
fanning away at the fire and had said, "You must not be afraid to use spirit,
foreigners can pay for spirit." Since then she had always used spirit. It was
true that foreigners could pay. And now she was using spirit, and it would
have been like any other fire that she made with spirit, had not the dogs been
aroused by the children shouting at the door, had she not tripped over the
shovelful of charcoal between her and the fire, had she not tumbled on top of
the fire with the spirit-can a-pour and been blown to death, and the dogs
along with her.
The wife and her brother and her husband left the village as fast as they
could get away. "We must find three other dogs," they said.
The girl's parents asked them for money, since she had died in their service.
They got the money. "It was her fault for using spirit," they said, "but
foreigners can pay." As for the brother, he sincerely mourned her death and
went away no longer brooding over the mad Finnish lady.
The Friendly One suffered from stomach-spasms for some time after the
catastrophe and had to lie very still in bed. He lay and pined. The dead girl's
mother nursed him. Everyone tried to feel sorry for him, but they were more
irritated than sorry. Though they still called him the Friendly One, they said it
more in mockery than in sympathy. He talked too much about that day. He had
gone for a walk with the brother, and on their way back to the village he had
begun to feel cold. He was wearing only his grey pullover. The brother
suggested to him that he should run home. He was in a merry mood and
started running home, leaving the brother behind. When he reached the
schoolhouse the children were just coming out and joined in his merry mood.
They ran along with him, and he got the idea of taking them to the house of the
American family. The American wife and husband loved children—that was
why they had the dogs. They had often talked of giving a party for the village
children, but were afraid that the children might be made stiff and
embarrassed by it. But a spontaneous party would be different. They had a
gramophone and always many good things to eat in the house in tins and
boxes. How pleased they would be. They liked things done in a carefree
way. Then that happened.
"I feel it much," he would say, "I feel it much." Then he would have to
vomit and the dead girl's mother would bring him a basin.
He no longer paid visits to the villagers or the foreigners, all paid visits to
him, wondering how long it would go on.
"He feels it much," they said, shrugging their shoulders, "he feels it much."
While the Friendly One lay ill, a rich American lady came to the village
and decided to settle down there for the rest of her life. This made him very
uneasy. "I must get up and pay her a visit," he said.
He dressed himself and went off with a copy of his book under his arm. She
was sympathetic and had a pleasing appearance. She had learned German at
school and remembered a little. All her classmates had chosen French, but
she had chosen German—she did not know why. She was a serious woman
and it was plain that she wanted to marry in an honourable, serious way. Yet
the Friendly One had no heart for his old gallantries. He came back with his
book under his arm and got into bed again. He was not himself any more. The
dead girl's sister was only twelve. She would have her grandmother's house
now when she married, but in a few years he would be an old man.
"Good-bye, dear friends," he said, "I feel it much."
"He felt it much," they said of him when he had gone, shrugging their
shoulders.
In Germany he opened a toy-shop. In a few years he was an old man. Every
morning he wound up all the automatic toys and watched them slow down
again. When people came in to buy he would keep them waiting a little at the
front of the shop and then come out from his room at the back saying, "Excuse
me for keeping you waiting, I am an author, you know." Outside, over his
shop, the sign read: Hermann Vogel —Poet and Writer—Toys. The paper in
which he wrapped
purchases had a picture on it of a girl playing with three dogs, and under it
the rhyme:
Why is the child's heart so light?
It plays by day and sleeps by night.
The world is but a spinning toy
And sorrow but a broken joy.
What shall we do to-morrow then?
To Hermann Vogel's we'll go again.

SCHOOLGIRLS

THE Mathematics Master was the youngest master, and everyone was in love
with him. They wondered how old he was, how he spent his holidays, what
his conversation with ordinary people was like, what sort of family he came
from, and if he had a pretty sister. He was really a simple, almost
uninteresting person, but all this wondering about him made him seem an
enchanted character, and he reacted to their romancing by developing
eccentricities quite foreign to his simple nature. When he entered the
classroom he would deliberately ruffle his naturally tidy hair with a gesture
of affected unconsciousness. In the middle of an exposition he would
suddenly turn his back upon his pupils and put his hand to his forehead as if
some important private matter were weighing on his mind. He took to
wearing different coats with different trousers, because this was the kind of
thing they noticed. And, finally, he bought himself a spherical bell for his
desk, which he would tap from time to time for no apparent reason.
When Judith came to the school she made up her mind not to be in love with
the Mathematics Master. He noticed that she did not behave towards him as
the others did, and this made him nervous. The other girls decided that he
was in love with Judith, but it was only that she made him feel that he had a
weak character. The other girls were excited about him and Judith. Every
time he spoke to her or looked at her they looked at one another significantly.
Judith was a stout, strong- willed girl with a very pink face. She was not
pretty, but very wholesome-looking. She was engaged. Her parents gave her
complete freedom. She had lived in Paris with her brother, who was a
painter. It was an exciting thing for the other girls to have Judith among them.
She laughed a lot and talked knowingly and brought an atmosphere of
confusion and drama into the school. She made the other girls feel guilty and
inferior for being unsophisticated. Everyone wanted to do something wrong.
She was an engaged girl, but she never talked of marrying. Her fiancé was a
painter, like her brother, and also lived in Paris. He wrote letters to Judith
full of manly gossip about the different women he met and what his various
men friends were up to, and never a word about the weather, or his having a
cold, or even about love. Letters from women or mothers were always about
health and the weather. Judith let them read all his letters. Judith was like a
man. They divided their affections between her and the Mathematics Master.
Judith's stoutness and pinkness made her seem indestructible; but, as is
often the case with such girls, she had a weak heart. She got ill and was sent
to the sick-room for several weeks for a rest. During her absence school life
became very dull. The girls lost interest in the Mathematics Master, and he
for his part felt neglected and cross. He began to have a poor opinion of
himself. The girls talked more of home and thought of Christmas. They were
allowed to visit Judith only one at a time and for only ten minutes at a time.
She amused them as much as ever, but the things she said later formed the
subjects of serious conversations among them about themselves. During
Judith's illness the school grew up.
When Judith came back from the sick-room she had to have private lessons
in everything, to help her to catch up with the others. During the private
Mathematics lessons she and the Mathematics Master grew more and more
irritated with each other. He secretly blamed her for his loss of favour with
the other girls, she secretly blamed him for not having fallen in love with her.
He would give her little problems and tap his bell impatiently while waiting
for her to work them out. "Stop tapping that bell," she would say impudently.
She would purposely waste time over these problems to make him tap his
bell. After these lessons both always looked miserable. Judith said that she
would not return after the Christmas holidays. She was used to livelier times.
Coming to the school had been a sort of joke with herself. The other girls,
partly from tact, partly from a new grown-up instinct of not letting anyone
else's affairs be more important to them than their own, kept carefully aloof
from Judith's doings with the Mathematics Master. Indeed, they now felt
rather like married women; Judith was hysterical and adolescent. They
mothered her.
Judith felt this loss of prestige strongly. It made her still more irritated with
the Mathematics Master. He himself was already beginning to think of
changing to another school. The climate did not suit him. Switzerland was a
silly, undignified country for a man to earn his living in. There was something
farcical about his too-high salary. Better a shabby salary at a decently shabby
boys' school in England. When he thought of going back to England, however,
he could not put Judith out of his head. She was like some responsibility that
he had contracted in Switzerland.
During one of the private lessons the Mathematics Master threw the bell in
Judith's direction. It was a nickel-plated iron bell. It accidentally hit her in
the face, breaking her nose. Judith never saw the other girls again. She
moved out of the school immediately and went to live at an hotel until her
nose was cured. The Mathematics Master resigned and moved out of the
Master's House. He went to live at Judith's hotel. He did not feel that he
could go back to England before her nose was cured. Her nose turned out a
little crooked, but it did not spoil her looks. All the same, it increased his
sense of responsibility towards her. It made her his Judith. Judith was gay
again. "You must come back to Paris with me and be introduced as the man
who broke my nose," she said. "Otherwise they'll never believe how it
happened and I'll never hear the end of it. I've got to brazen it out."
 So he went along with her to Paris to help her brazen it out. He met her
fiancé. The engagement seemed to be a way they had of teasing each other
rather than a reality. People treated the fiancé as Judith's first husband and the
Mathematics Master as her prospective second. All her friends took it for
granted that Judith would go to England with him. Everyone seemed anxious
to get rid of her; she was a difficulty. Beyond sending her money twice a
year, her parents in America did not bother about her. Her mother was an
active Los Angeles clubwoman, her father a film-director. They had resolved
that no daughter of theirs should be a film actress. So long as she was in
Europe they thought of her as safe.
He felt more and more responsible for her. Judith herself made no
opposition. She looked forward to new experiences. They got married
because he could not think of any other way of arranging things. They were
not in love with each other and had no intention of keeping house together,
but he could not introduce her in England as the girl whose nose he had
broken.
In England they first made a tour because Judith wanted to see things. She
laughed at everything and called it typically English. He felt awkward
travelling with her. He was a schoolmaster and she was only a schoolgirl.
He decided to send her to an English school. He himself got an appointment
at a boys' school in Cornwall. The school he put her to was also in Cornwall.
It was a school for exceptional older girls and had liberal traditions. He
explained to the Head Mistress that she was his wife, but that she was very
young. The Head Mistress agreed that she was very young. But as a married
woman she would have certain privileges. She must be made to feel herself
older than the other girls. She was allowed a car. She had permission to use
it on week-ends to visit her husband. She had a room in the Mistresses' wing.
The other girls were not supposed to know that she was married. She was
presented to them as a special student who might not be staying long. But she
soon told them, as a secret, that she was married. This made them suspicious
of her, though she talked freely with them and was very entertaining. They felt
uncomfortably older than her. To be married at her age was no better than
playing with dolls. She understood their hostility and tried to appease it by
making fun of her husband to them. But no one but herself thought the situation
amusing. To other people it was embarrassing, to her husband painful. For
example, he lived in a house by himself instead of with the unmarried
masters, as he would have preferred, in case she should suddenly decide to
leave school and play at being his wife for a while. But she did not even visit
him. When he visited her she would walk with him in the school grounds,
giggling whenever he tried to talk to her seriously. Finally he gave up visiting
her.
On Saturday afternoons Judith generally drove in her car to
Penzance with two or three other girls. One Saturday, on their way to the
cinema, Judith suddenly cried, "There's my husband!" She ran across the
street and brought him back to the other girls. They all went to the cinema
together. He did not sit next to her, but to Mary Vaughan. After that she met
her husband every Saturday afternoon in Penzance, taking two or three other
girls along as usual. Mary Vaughan was always among them. She was not a
good-looking girl, but she had social talents. She could talk well and be
interested in things that were not really interesting. She and Judith's husband
fell in love with each other.
This made a difference in the other girls' feeling towards Judith. It
disconnected her from her husband and made her seem one of them. They all
co-operated with her in promoting romance between Mary and her husband.
They did not think of him as a married man. Judith made Mary her best
friend. Her husband often visited her now. They would have tea with the
Head Mistress, and Mary, as her best friend, would always be there. It was
decided that at the end of the school year Judith should go to live with her
husband and that Mary should go with her. Judith could not do without Mary.
Mary was an orphan. Her aunt and guardian, the Literature Mistress,
approved of the arrangement. Mary was rather poor, and would receive a
generous monthly salary from Judith as companion and housekeeper.
The girls also approved of the arrangement. They regarded it as a
satisfactory outcome of the romance. Mary gave the household a sane tone,
artfully softening Judith's girlish un- conventionalities. She made friends with
the wives of the other masters on Judith's behalf. She taught them to say, "Of
course, she is very young." Judith was happy. Mary took care of everything.
Mary and her husband were in love with each other: that made the monotony
bearable. Nothing was ever said between any of them about it, it was Judith's
secret. As the years passed Judith kept up a running intimacy with the
successive courses of girls at her old school. She drove them to Penzance on
Saturday afternoons and told them the secret about Mary and her husband.
She took them to her house to see Mary and her husband. The girls felt noble
and understanding about them. "They are so quiet and well-behaved," they
said, "that it must be real love." They envied Judith her secret.
Things went on with automatic serenity year after year until Judith's
husband died. Judith could not help crying a lot, thinking about how much
Mary would miss him. Several of the girls from the school came to stay with
Judith and console her while Mary saw to the funeral and wound up their
affairs. In his will Judith's husband had expressed the wish that Mary would
never leave Judith. This was the only expression of his love for Mary that he
allowed himself.
"Isn't Mary wonderful?" Judith said. "They loved each other. It was real
love." The girls' sympathy kept Judith from thinking about her future life. She
did not need to think. Mary looked after everything. When their affairs were
settled, Mary took her aunt's post at the school as Literature Mistress, her
aunt being very old and glad to retire. Judith was by now a full-grown
woman but still very girlish in her ways.
"My parents do not want me in Los Angeles with them," she told the other
girls. "They have always been afraid of my becoming a film-actress. And I
must stay with Mary. It was my husband's wish. They loved each other
deeply."
Judith had a room again in the Mistresses' wing. She gave the school a new
sitting-room and they called her jokingly the Sitting-room Mistress because
she spent most of her time there. She had a good effect on the girls. She made
a link between them and the mistresses. There were some things the
mistresses were too old to understand. She told the girls about Mary and her
husband. An atmosphere of soft excitement escaped from the sitting-room and
delicately pervaded the whole building. Girls liked being at the school. It
became very popular.
 THE SECRET

'ATHENS' FOGARTY was a young man with white hair, a thin face, dark skin,
bright, nervous eyes, and the manner of an influential newspaper critic. He
was, however, only the outdoor man of a group of unprofessional criminals.
He was known as 'Athens' because he gave an impression of culture and
foreign birth. He came of an ambitious Dublin slum- family. Athens was the
only one of them who had a fixed address. His rooms in Great James Street
were soberly and even tastefully furnished. Athens knew exactly what not to
buy, do or say; he knew how to give the impression that he was a gentleman.
He enjoyed his life. He never wasted time on a prospective victim who was
not first of all a distinguished and interesting acquaintance. As he never
participated actively in the victimization itself, the gentlemanly charm of his
life was not poisoned by the consciousness that he had an ulterior motive in
getting to know people; he never allowed himself to feel that he had. He
brought the victim and his partners together, but knew nothing of the sequel
except that on some occasions he was given more money than on others.
As he handed over the prospective victim to his partners in a spirit of
friendship, so were the crimes committed crimes of friendship: their criminal
object was always achieved by betrayal of trust. They were men of ordinary
occupations and respectability who in their spare time made friends with
people presented to them by Athens. If they got no other advantage from some
friendships than the pleasure of having to do with new people, this was
something, for they led otherwise dull lives. In such cases it was a rule that
Athens should at any rate have his pocket-money. Athens had to live. The
stranger, for his part, had the benefit of their homely company up to the
moment of victimization, or attempted victimization. He was generally a
lonely fellow, with indulgent standards, therefore, of conversation and social
intercourse.
Athens had not made any finds for over a month. He had his pocket-money,
for he had to live. But the partners were not only getting bored, they were on
the point of losing confidence in him. He made up his mind to provide them
with several finds at once. He sat alone at the Café Long at the same table
every night, grandly reviewing his thoughts and now and then staring hard
into his notebook. It was only a miscellany of addresses, expense-entries,
and apt remarks; but his studied handling of it transfigured it into something
mysteriously private.
He sat on the red plush bench against the wall, facing into the café. A
distinguished-looking elderly dancer dropped gaily but exhaustedly on the
bench beside him, at the next table. Athens had been watching him—he had
been giving the band money to play his favourite music.
"An old bird like me," he said to Athens in a tone of friendly apology,
"can't go trotting around to new tunes." Athens nodded without smiling,
consulting his notebook abstractedly. Mr. Sweet, as his name proved to be,
slipped nearer to him.
"You look like a man of sense and feeling. I need advice. I am drunk but
absolutely in earnest. Here's my card. My brother is the diplomat of that
name. You're a writer or something aren't you?" Athens nodded non-
committally.
"I have a young friend, my adopted son. I adopted him from idealistic
motives. You're an idealist, aren't you? But you have a practical nose. I have
always been a student of physiognomy, that's what made me speak to you.
You can help me with my young friend. My brother won't have anything to do
with me because of him, nor any of my friends. So we travel about together,
but lately he's been getting tired of me. So I spend my evenings playing the
fool with heartless young women. Those two I came here with have found
some men of their own age. I know when I am in the way. My young friend
has made friends with a man from Bermuda who is trying to persuade him to
go back with him to live. He has a mental sanatorium there called
Nebuchadnezzar House, where people assume the different historical
characters they believe themselves to be and live up to them. They've had a
murder and a suicide already and he wants my young friend Bob to go as
Buddha. What I say to Bob is, how can a blond like him be Buddha? But
Nebuchadnezzar says that physical characteristics do not count in
reincarnations. He's a bad man. He gets rich crazy American Jews to work
on his tobacco plantations as Babylonian slaves. Oh, poor Bob. He was
always interested in the sky. I wanted him to be an astronomer. We used to
talk a lot about the stars."
Athens was by now listening to Mr. Sweet's story with discreet sympathy.
Suddenly Mr. Sweet grew alarmed. "You won't write an article about this?"
he cried. "It would disgrace my brother."
"Indeed, sir," answered Athens coldly, "I was just wondering whether,
considering the condition you were in, it was honourable in me to listen to
you at all."
 This answer sobered Mr. Sweet considerably. "You make me recollect
myself," he said, straightening up against the back of the bench. "My instinct
in opening my heart to you of all these people here was a correct one. It is
difficult for a man in my position not to open his heart sometimes." He
ordered drinks for both and sat watching the dancers glumly, while Athens
returned to his previous pose. Suddenly Mr. Sweet stood up, shouting against
the music, "Bob! Bob!"
Bob, Nebuchadnezzar, another man and a girl came over to their tables.
Bob was nineteen or twenty. He was very fair, with that look of perfect
happiness common to young people who are indifferent about what they may
do, or have to do, next. He greeted Mr. Sweet with affectionate disrespect as
'Old Kettle'. Mr. Sweet shook hands with Nebuchadnezzar in a ceremonious
manner, like a man anxious not to fail in courtesy towards his greatest enemy.
Apart from several strings of coloured beads glistening against his white
shirt-front, Nebuchadnezzar's appearance was not peculiar, except as any
large black-haired man with a red beard is, at the least, striking-looking. His
conversation consisted of sudden loud, unrelated pronouncements, followed
by frantic tossings of phlegm in his throat. The other man was a young
American university professor on his vacation. His name was Archibald
Root, and he had fallen in love with the girl, who was older than himself and
whom he admired for her knowledge of life.
Athens was not introduced at all, as a mark of respect. Mr. Sweet referred
to him as 'our worthy friend'. The girl, who seemed to know Mr. Sweet well,
teased him for money for a fur coat. He refused to give her the money
because he felt ashamed before Athens. "No," he said, "it is not becoming.
You will marry Root and be the wife of a poor man."
"I will not marry Root," replied the girl, "and he is not a poor man. His
father is a Methodist minister. He has a large wealthy congregation.
Archibald is a professor at a Methodist university. He teaches public
speaking and is well paid. He dances beautifully. But I will not marry him."
The girl got up and made Archibald dance with her. He came back alone,
saying miserably, "She met some friends. It makes me feel awfully inferior.
I'm too simple for her. Yet to go back to America without her would be like
death for me."
Athens smiled cautiously. "It is only the first taste of death that is bitter, the
angels say. After that, it's a great relief to be no longer alive."
Nebuchadnezzar glared at him. "A Jewish rabbi once told me that Christ
was only an idea. Everyone famous is only an idea until he's born again in
some insignificant person. No one is real unless he's insignificant and
unknown. Bob is Buddha. No one knows it. He doesn't know it himself. That
makes it all the more certain. He takes my word for it because I'm a
convincing talker. When I say a thing I mean it." He coughed stormily and
Bob grinned at the other three. "Yes, he means it," Bob said. "I know nothing
about it. He has it all worked out. I'm to go to Bermuda with him and help
him calm down a lot of people he has there who are different things in the
past. Apparently if you know about it it's very bad for the head—unless
you're a business-man like Nebuchadnezzar. He says he was always a good
business-man, that's why he managed the Jews so well in the old days. You
will let me go to Bermuda, won't you?" Bob said, addressing Mr. Sweet. "It
won't cost much."
"And what about the stars?" Mr. Sweet asked wistfully.
"Nebuchadnezzar says that astronomy is amateur religion— heavenly
bodies and all that, but no money in it," Bob answered. "You never let me
think of money. Nebuchadnezzar's going to show me how to make money. I'm
to have a share."
Nebuchadnezzar here interposed, "Greek gods and goddesses never pay
their bills. But they never go away. It raises the tone. Mortals, however
ancient, are so vulgar." He choked, inscrutably. Archibald and Mr. Sweet
were brooding. Bob grinned at Athens, in careless optimism.
"Well, gentlemen," said Athens, rising at this point, "it does not matter what
happens, so long as something happens. I personally am going home to bed
and I advise you to do the same. Come to my rooms to-morrow evening.
Perhaps I can be of use to you. A stranger often makes a good sedative—or a
good stimulant. In any case, you might like a change from café-haunting." He
spoke these words in a severe but not unfriendly manner, in keeping with the
gentlemanly eccentricity of his assumed character. Athens was not really
eccentric, only painfully aware that he was not a man of genius. This was
what made him different from the rest of his family. They didn't mind what
they were. He minded what he was not. It made him fastidious. It made him
able to impress people, externally, while inside he was full of harsh
disappointment with himself.
He gave them his name and address and left them. They sat drinking for a
little while in a softened mood. Nebuchadnezzar left first, saying, "Achilles
had his heel, Siegfried a weak spot between the shoulders, but I have my own
troubles. It's all got to be kept going. Good-night." He went off in a spasm to
his suite in London's most expensive hotel. It was difficult to tell during these
spasms whether he was laughing or not.
 Archibald went next. He lodged in a house near the British Museum. But all
London, it seemed to him, stood in the shadow of the British Museum. He had
written to his father, "Living in London makes you feel that the present
doesn't exist. Even the most modern features seem antiquated. It is rather as if
the world had come to an end and people went on living just the same, like
historical puppets." Mr. Sweet and Bob had a flat in Ebury Street. People
who had flats in Ebury Street were always people that other people knew.
But this was not the case with Mr. Sweet. He lived there in memory of the
time when people had known him. He persuaded himself that they had
dropped him because of Bob, but Bob had come afterwards. They had never
really dropped him, it had just so happened. Bob did not go back with him
that night. He took a room in a pub somewhere between the flat and Chelsea.
"I want to be left alone," he said. Bob's mother had been a charwoman in a
workhouse. His father's second wife had left him alone. Bob had always
been used to having people leave him alone. Mr. Sweet had left him
magnificently alone. But Mr. Sweet was now getting to the age when people
fall to pieces unless they are treated nicely. Bob didn't know how to treat
people nicely; it took a lot of pretending—pretending interest. He had liked
astronomy because it did not involve pretending interest; only the coldest
curiosity was required. He felt the same about Nebuchadnezzar.
On the first floor of the house in Great James Street where Athens Fogarty
had his rooms were the offices of a swimming association. On the second
floor lived a medium called Beatrice. Athens was on the third floor. When
the four strangers arrived the next night six of his partners were present. Four
were playing cards, one was talking, one was reading. He introduced them.
They were Mr. Atkinson, Mr. Hervey, Mr. Gordon, Mr. Slade, Mr. Schiller
and Mr. Gainsbury. They behaved diffidently towards the strangers. Mr.
Gordon ran an employment bureau. He told humorous stories about the
applicants. From this they went on to talk about making love to servant-girls.
Mr. Root said a servant-girl had poisoned his mind when he was a boy.
Nebuchadnezzar asserted that servant-girls made the best mothers; in ancient
times all the mothers were slaves. He had many children and was glad to say
that their mothers were not ladies. Mr. Sweet said that he had never had a
child. Bob said that if people would stop having children the world would go
on just the same. Athens remarked that no one would ever see the end of the
world. If the world ended, people would die first, and it was nothing new to
die. "So long as we have death, gentlemen, we are safe."
At this point the conversation broke up. Mr. Schiller said that he was a
mere business man and couldn't afford to play the Count. The others said that
they weren't of noble birth either, and laboriously got into their overcoats.
Mr. Gainsbury suggested that they should all dine together the next evening.
The four strangers accepted eagerly. It made things seem very cosy. Athens
felt that he had done his duty.
But meanwhile the strangers were still on his hands. He went downstairs to
Beatrice and asked her if she would operate for four visitors of his. He knew
her in a neighbourly way, but had never had anything to do with her
spiritualistically before. She was a sincere medium. She would not take
money, but each member of her audience must give her a personal token, not
to be returned. She could not operate without these tokens. Nebuchadnezzar
gave her one of his necklaces. Each bead was a semi-precious stone.
"Lucrezia Borgia was a good woman," he said on offering the necklace to
her, "but her father being a pope went to her head. Women shouldn't use their
heads. It makes devils of them." Beatrice did not smile at this. She was
beginning to get in touch with the other side. Mr. Root gave her a blue silk
handkerchief, unused. Bob gave her a diamond ring, a present from his
foster-father. Mr. Sweet gave her his watch-charm, a gold nugget that had
always been a little heavy to carry. Athens gave her a silver-plated pocket-
pencil.
At Beatrice's request all the lights were turned off. They could still faintly
see one another, for a little light came up to them from the street. Then she
explained that to-night she would only reveal matters of world interest, but
that whatever she revealed they must treat as confidential. Otherwise they
might suffer personal injury or misfortune. The people on the other side were
exacting and pitiless. They did not like being bothered and imposed
capricious conditions. For example, another condition was that those to
whom she confided the message must meet once a year in secret in
commemoration of it: 'they' did not like the things they revealed to be
forgotten. The conditions being acquiesced in, Beatrice began etherealizing.
No one must speak to her while she was etherealizing. She walked blindly
round and round the room, seeming to grow lighter and lighter. Her feet left
the floor. She dissolved into a mist at the ceiling and slowly drifted down to
the floor again, like a mass of inert silk.
"They are very cruel to-night," she whispered, as if in pain. "They seem
very angry. They are not my usual friends. The sun is moving farther and
farther away, but there is still light. The light cuts like little knives." She
shivered all over, her teeth chattering. "It has never been like this before. The
people who are telling me things are living minds. You are there," she
screamed, pointing at Nebuchadnezzar, "and you!" pointing at Bob.
Nebuchadnezzar was not affected by this information but Bob gave a whoop
of triumph.
"What did I tell you!" he cried, slapping Mr. Sweet hard on the back. Mr.
Sweet looked as if he were going to faint. Archibald got up and sat down
again.
"They tell me," said Beatrice in a stronger voice, "that the world will end
to-morrow morning at twenty-four minutes past eleven." Having said this,
Beatrice stretched herself out flat on the floor and lay as if asleep. Archibald
rushed at her and shook her. "But suppose we go on living?" he asked
feverishly. Beatrice answered without waking, "Then you'll only be ghosts."
Athens switched on the lights and carried Beatrice downstairs, where he
laid her on her bed; he had heard that it was dangerous to disturb people
when they were like this and he felt, besides, that everyone had had enough
of her. When he came up Mr. Sweet was sitting as he had left him and
Archibald was staring into a mirror, but Bob and Nebuchadnezzar had turned
on the gramophone and were whirling round the room. Bob knew a way to
make records shriek, though it meant breaking the spring.
"I'm glad to see you take this little incident in the right spirit," said Athens
pleasantly.
The next evening the four strangers dined with the six partners of Athens.
Athens's absence was politely accounted for. Bob and Nebuchadnezzar
played with each other like bear and puppy, but Mr. Sweet and Mr. Root
were badly shaken. Mr. Sweet confided to the partners that they had all had
an awful experience since they had met—something they had to keep secret.
They must excuse their erratic behaviour. By the end of the evening the
partners felt cross and malicious. They hadn't been able to get hold. Mr.
Sweet, drunk and hysterical, was still a possibility, however. Mr. Slade and
Mr. Atkinson got him into a taxi and took him to the house of Mr. Wheeler,
another partner. There they undressed him and put him to bed and tried to
work on his mind all night by making gruesome noises just outside his room.
But in the morning, instead of gibbering out his secret to them, as they had
hoped he would, he appeared to have suffered from a stroke during the night
and died. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and they were
disgusted. They were somehow disgusted with Athens.
Athens and the three strangers went to the funeral. So far none of them had
mentioned the secret. They all suspected that the old man had given it away
the night of his death, but they did not like to talk about it. They went to a tea-
shop near the cemetery after the funeral, trying to behave naturally with one
another. Mr. Root spoke of his return to America. He thought of going to
Canada; he had a friend who had a ranch there. He needed something to calm
him down before he started teaching again. Europe had upset him. Bob kept
laughing to himself and was very imperious with Nebuchadnezzar. It almost
seemed as if Nebuchadnezzar was beginning to be afraid of him.
Nebuchadnezzar ate a great many buns and made gruff jokes with the
waitress, a stupid girl who answered "That's the truth!" to whatever he said
to her that sounded like philosophy. When he choked on his words she bent
over him in a motherly way, attributing his spasms to the buns.
Athens realized that their embarrassment could only be bridged over by
some reference to the strange events that had brought them together. "Well,"
he said with quiet recklessness, "since death seems to be still with us, the
world has apparently not come to an end!" Bob pretended to pay no attention
to this sally. Archibald went red and said, "I can't stand this any longer. This
is my address in America. If you decide to meet in a year's time, let me know
where it is to be." He got up and went out without shaking hands, leaving
three cards on the table. Athens picked up one of them and put it away
carefully in his note-case. He then looked at his companions with an
expression of forced amusement. Nebuchadnezzar paid no attention to the
remaining cards, but Bob picked up both of them and put them angrily in his
pocket. Then he stood up and waved his knife at Athens. "Think you can play
around with us, do you?" he sang. "I'll show you!" He plunged his blunt knife
against Athens's coat. Athens scowled and said, "Don't be silly!"
Nebuchadnezzar ran into the kitchen crying, "Buddha is trying to kill the
Devil! Be yourself, Bob! Buddha, be yourself!" He crouched under a table in
the kitchen, still crying out to Bob. The waitress ran out of the kitchen,
screaming.
Meanwhile Bob had found a sharp knife at the cake-counter. "Don't be silly,
eh?" he shrieked, plunging it into Athens, this time effectively. The waitress
ran into the street, screaming. Some of the cemetery attendants came back
with her and held Bob until the police came. Athens was dead.
Nebuchadnezzar remained under the table until he was pulled out. He was
arrested along with Bob.
Athens retained in death his expression of forced amusement. His partners
gave him a decent burial. Beatrice was the only woman present. "It didn't
hurt him to go," she said. "He'll be a great man on the other side. He had a
fine manner, and they like that there." Beatrice, of course, remembered
nothing of the message she had given to Athens and the four strangers. Her
spiritualistic consciousness did not mix with her worldly consciousness. Of
the circumstance of Athens's death she only said, "He chose these two people
as his instruments because they were childlike and selfless." The partners
agreed that Athens was the kind of man who did things deliberately. "He must
have seen that there was something odd about them and yet he made friends
with them," she said. "Athens was no fool." The partners agreed that he was
no fool. His death, following on Mr. Sweet's, had given them a fright. They
had no heart to go on with their crime-work. Athens seemed to have taken it
with him. They thought of themselves as having also been his instruments.
Bob, who had inherited all Mr. Sweet's money, was brilliantly defended at
his trial. It was pointed out that at his mystery house in Bermuda
Nebuchadnezzar had already inspired one murder and one suicide. Bob had
come under this madman's influence. He had been pampered by his late
foster- father and was accustomed to follow his fancy. Nebuchadnezzar had
told him that he was Buddha and he, more from boredom than from any innate
insanity, had allowed himself to play with the idea. Nebuchadnezzar would
say nothing, but the waitress, an obviously unimaginative girl, had sworn that
Nebuchadnezzar had referred to Bob as Buddha and to the murdered man as
the Devil. Bob had become unbalanced for a few moments and during these
moments had committed the crime. He had just come from the burial of his
foster-father, to whom he had been tenderly devoted. His grief, his aloneness
in the world and this madman's persistent pursuit of him had been too much
for his undisciplined mind. He was now in complete possession of himself
and had had sufficient punishment in the remorse and sorrow he was
suffering. His counsel asked for a full acquittal and got it. The case filled the
papers under the headline 'Bob and Nebuchadnezzar'. His counsel spoke of
him always as 'Bob' to keep the jury in mind of his youth.
Nebuchadnezzar was certified insane and was allowed to enter a private
mental home approved by the court. The head of this home was a certain
Professor Grail who had made himself famous by transforming several
wealthy criminals into respectable authors. He treated the insane people
under his care as lonely intellects that had gone astray for want of
sympathetic collaborators. He took great interest in Nebuchadnezzar's case
and began a book with him on the recurrence of historic personality-types in
modern individuals. He was authorized to buy Nebuchadnezzar's Bermuda
establishment, and ran it on scientific lines with great success, putting in
charge a former patient of his, Lady Charmaine Horner, of the distinguished
Horner family. She had once suffered from a mania for stealing babies from
wealthy and well-known families and conveying them, under what she
claimed at her trial to be providential inspiration, to distant cities, where she
placed them with comparatively poor, socially inconspicuous families,
pretending that they were charity orphans. She had believed herself a chosen
agent of social diffusion and Professor Grail had cured her by writing a book
with her on family continuity as a cause of insanity. In Bermuda Lady
Charmaine relied largely on a system (elaborated with Professor Grail) for
breaking the chain of inherited thought-habits. It did not work so well,
naturally, with people who did not have much family continuity behind them;
but the theory was that everybody who had a persistent madness had some
family stricture, even if it was only symbolic, like being a Jew.
Bob, soon after his acquittal, went to America, where he looked up
Archibald Root. Archibald persuaded him to enroll himself as a student in
his university. Bob became a sensible theological seminarist, but instead of
taking orders he retained the independence to which his wealth entitled him,
travelling from state to state as a lecturer on religion. He was known as 'Bob,
the Happy Christian'. Archibald always boasted that Bob had learned the
elements of public speaking from him. Bob loved platform life. He had learnt
that the only way to make people leave one alone was to expose oneself to
their curiosity in a good-tempered way and talk to them frankly about
themselves; this gave them the illusion that one was being frank with them
about oneself.
When Bob finally tired of platform life he married Archibald's sister, a
placid, pleasantly cynical woman a good deal older than himself, who was
anxious, in her own interests, that he should not find the marriage an
inconvenience. Bob renewed his former studies in astronomy. He built an
observatory on the roof of his house. On clear Sunday evenings he gave star-
talks there to people who, like himself, were cold- hearted and apathetic and
yet selfish enough to be amiably tolerant of the world they lived in,
especially of its less exacting elements. Every year he dined alone with his
brother-in- law in commemoration of the message they had had from the other
side. They explained this custom to other people as a sentimental anniversary
of the formation of their friendship. The secret itself was never referred to
between them. Nebuchadnezzar was always sent a perfunctory invitation a
month before. Throughout this meal each year Archibald and Bob always
nursed an irritable half-hope that he would not turn up, and a superstitious
half-hope that he would. But, of course, he never did.
 THE INCURABLE VIRTUE

EMILE SAINT-BLAGUE had been a lively, versatile painter in his youth, but he
had abused his energy by painting too many pictures; so that in what might
have been the ripe period of his art he had nothing left but ideas. A man who
has nothing left but ideas may be of great service to his friends, but he is of
no use at all to himself. Emile was certainly an inspiration to his friends.
He had inherited a little money at just about the time when he had found
himself physically exhausted by painting. And so he was an object of respect,
not of pity—as he might have been if he had been poor as well as idle. Nor
was he really idle: he was continually thinking about things. Every evening
after ten he gave supper in his studio and talked about life in an interesting,
informed way. His friends ate and listened and gathered in phrases and
argumentative points and were thus able, in their turn, to talk to people
sophisticatedly, gliding intelligently from one prejudice to another.
Emile kept in touch with contemporary politics, science, literature and
philosophy and threw over his friends a cloak of protective verbiage. He
was not only their guiding intellect, he was an angel. He had risen beyond the
egotistic creative plane which they inhabited, and lived, so to speak,
posthumously, looking down on their innocent activities from a benevolent
vantage of ideas. Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they
must not think too much—thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile's
viewpoint.
Emile's friends learnt from him the meaning of intelligence, without having
to be actively intelligent themselves. They learnt to be grateful to the rest of
the world, the non-artists, for having worries, for being elders. If nobody
worried, life would certainly come to a standstill; there would be no artistic
stimulus to irresponsibility and youthfulness. Emile was an elder, but he had
once been young. Other people, the non- artists, were born elders. The wisest
course was for the young to be grateful to the old and to show their gratitude
by seeming to understand how important it was to have worries—instead of
behaving as if worries were a disease. It was this kind of delicacy that sold
art; people liked to think of pictures as tributes to their intellectual
superiority. It was not the way artists painted but the way they behaved that
determined the commercial status of art.
Emile was good. He did not lend his friends money or, beyond providing
inexpensive light suppers, help them in any tangible way, but he mothered
their minds. He lived for them and was proud of them—not of what they did,
but of their wordly discretion. He liked to feel that they did not make boors
of themselves in the society of the mature. His acquaintances—besides his
real friends—were all very knowing people, old rather than young
characters. With these he sometimes lunched or dined, but only to exercise
his ideas; he did not form or maintain friendships outside the immediate field
of his mothering interests. His real friends knew that he lived only for them.
No one must ever say anything against Emile. They called him 'poor Emile',
as a reminder to themselves that no one must ever say anything against him.
Emile was good. He lived for them. He spoiled them. He carried them along
from one revolution round the sun to the next, taking upon himself all the
nausea and strangeness of the movement. Women have performed something
like this service for men, making homes for them in which they could escape
from the sickening memories of their daily contortions in the giddy
gymnasium of life. Emile was even tenderer than a woman. He softened for
his friends the reckless variations of nature and the harsh progress of time.
They were aware of nothing except faint, pleasant impacts against themselves
of these otherwise terrible forces. Emile wanted his friends to feel mentally
pampered, and himself to be their pamperer. It was his incurable virtue. It is
also a curious fact that none of his friends ever married; which is a thing that
happens only when men are really successful. Emile's friends all wore a
pampered manly air. They worked hard and prospered gracefully. They were
absorbed in their art, but they knew their way about the ordinary streets of
human experience. And the clue to it all was Emile.
Then, one day, Emile was put in prison. He had run down and killed a
young unemployed shop-girl in the Bois de Boulogne. He had been reading
and driving at the same time. The young girl did not seem to have a family or
friends, but, all the same, Emile was put in prison. He was not put in prison
for long, because he was undoubtedly a respectable person and by birth a
Breton, and Bretons were known to be eccentric. The papers had first
referred to him as 'The Reading Motorist', and later, during the trial, as 'The
Artists' Socrates'. His friends testified warmly to his wisdom, his generosity,
his importance to them. Emile gave interviews to newspaper men, expressing
himself freely on current topics. The jury found him guilty of 'abstracted'
driving, and the judge sentenced him in very flattering language. "Here is a
distinguished gentleman of leisure," the judge said, "whose enthusiasm for
culture has made him the unfortunate instrument of the death of a young girl
who could not, in any case, have loved life too well." Not wishing to weaken
the admirable influence of this distinguished gentleman on his friends, he was
sending him to prison for two months only, as a friendly warning to eccentric
drivers; he hoped that this forced retirement would not be disagreeable to a
person of philosophic temperament.
But Emile did not like being in prison. He could not get at books and
papers. He missed his evenings with his friends, who came to see him
faithfully on visiting days, but who could not be expected to think of him in
quite the same way as before. They spoke of him as if, on entering prison, he
had ended another period of his life. "What will poor Emile do when he
comes out of prison?" they asked themselves. They thought of a voyage to
England, for Emile held the English in great admiration as a nation whose
rôle it was to influence other nations; England, like Emile, had an incurable
virtue. But a wisewoman had prophesied of him when he was a child that he
would meet his death in a large body of water, or else by suicide, and so
Emile never went on ships.
The night before the morning of his release, he was given the freedom of the
prison. He thought that it would interest him to sit in the receiving-room and
read the records of some of the prisoners with whom he had made friends,
and as a man of superior intelligence he was permitted to do this. He settled
down to study the history of his cell-mate, Jacques, a quiet, somewhat
educated working-man serving a year's term for the murder of a woman
whom he had loved and who had loved him, but who had wanted their
relations to remain of a purely spiritual character. The jury had found him
guilty of murder 'under provocation'. Jacques had been a delightful cell-mate.
He had thought about everything, and come to interesting conclusions. About
poetry, for example, he said that it was a mistake for poets to write as if they
were happy. This misled people into looking for happiness in poetry and
being puzzled by its melancholy effect upon them. All the really great poets
had made it plain, he said, that poetry was something depressing. From really
great poetry people expected nothing.
Emile learned from his study of Jacques' record that his mother had been an
'entertainer', of English birth, his father a waiter in Wagons-Lits. Jacques
was described as being of refined speech and behaviour and the victim of a
conflict between his class and his ideas. The murder had not been
characterized by exceptional brutality. His only previous offence had been a
quarrel with a gendarme who had tried to separate him from a woman of the
streets who seemed to be annoying him. He had taken the position that he had
a right to deal with the woman himself in a rational way. In this instance he
had been sentenced to ten days' imprisonment for interfering with a gendarme
in the execution of his duty, but the sincerity of his motives was
appreciatively noted. The record read almost like a certificate of good
character. In three weeks Jacques would be free. Emile resolved not to
neglect him. Jacques only needed someone to do his deeper thinking for him:
he was inclined to over-simplification. He had a working-man's natural
impatience with the intellectual confusion of his intellectual superiors. Emile
would reconcile him to intellectual confusion. Emile was quite calm now
about the change in his relations with his old friends. He knew he was dead
to them. He had stood sponsor to them in the universal course; and, with the
tact that inspires all guardian spirits, he now planned to withdraw and leave
them to enjoy their prosperity free from any cumbrous sense of indebtedness.
The last stage of his own earthly existence he would pass as inconspicuously
as possible, practising his incurable virtue of patronage in obscure paths
where bodily disintegration would not make him seem ridiculous.
For Emile had begun to disintegrate. He did not walk, but rather felt
himself pushed along. He looked down at his feet and turned them cruelly in
absurd directions: they were only a pair of shoes. While Emile was in the
midst of these almost jocular reflections, Suzanne, the famous flower-girl,
was brought in. Everyone knew her from her picture. She was old, healthy
and wicked, and always wore a man's hat, and always carried a large sea-
side umbrella under which she sat herself in all weathers, as in a stall, and
always had violets to sell at any season of the year. Along with violets she
also sold drugs; indeed Suzanne had turned 'violets' into a disreputable word.
She had never been arrested for selling drugs, but she was regularly arrested
several times a year for concealing in the flowers slips of paper bearing
indecent remarks and sketches, or messages that might be interpreted as
libels against the person who bought the flowers—to present them to perhaps
a mother or a wife or a fiancée or some other object of either respect or
affection. In this way, of course, Suzanne established a reputation as a
cynical jokester and averted suspicion from the real nature of the folded slips
of paper concealed in the bouquets which she sold to habitual purchasers;
and as she kept changing her pitch frequently, it was impossible for any of
her purchasers to be identified as habitual. Sometimes a gendarme would
catch a purchaser in the act of extracting a folded slip from his bouquet and
wink knowingly at him as he put it away slyly in his pocket for future
examination. Sometimes a gendarme would buy a bouquet himself and
present it to some friendly young woman, just for fun. And sometimes, as has
been explained, a respectable gentleman would innocently suffer
embarrassment and bring a charge against her. It was in consequence of such
a charge that she had been sentenced to these three weeks' imprisonment.
Suzanne was thus on terms of familiarity with the police, which meant that
they left her alone as much as possible, a necessary protection in her trade.
While she was in prison they always treated her well. They gave her
congenial, light jobs to do, such as cleaning the cells of prisoners who could
afford luxuries and whose standing with the prison staff permitted them to
enjoy them. Prison officers divided prisoners into two classes, those whom
they liked and those whom they didn't like, and discipline was administered
accordingly. Human nature, and not crime, was the chief element of prison
atmosphere.
Emile felt this strongly as he watched the behaviour of the prison officers
with Suzanne and of Suzanne with them. He had heard about Suzanne from
Jacques, whose mother had been one of her drug-children, as he expressed it.
She had often kept his mother in 'milk', though aware that money was a
somewhat romantic idea with her that might or might not materialize. She had
also looked after Jacques when his mother had work or in those crazy
periods when she 'got lost', taking him with her on her floral rounds. It was
through her influence that he had got his apprenticeship in a lock-making
establishment, and she had never held it against him that he had become a
locksmith rather than a burglar. Suzanne was good. Emile, watching her, felt
an almost professional bond with her. She had the same air of incurability as
himself.
They were introduced to each other in the receiving-room and seemed to
understand each other at once. Her blue-eyed wickedness was merely, he
argued with himself, a facial caricature of her internal goodness; and she, for
her part, forgave him his soft-hearted handsomeness because he had a
disagreeable speaking voice, sharp with suppressed egotism. He
accompanied her to her cell together with several prison officers, old friends
of hers. On the way they paid a visit to Jacques. She and Jacques would be
coming out at the same time. It was like leaving Jacques in her care. Suzanne
gave Emile an address at which to deliver her basket and umbrella the
following morning. She had been allowed to sprinkle her flowers and cover
them with a wet cloth. How happy Emile was as he walked out of the prison,
carrying Suzanne's basket and umbrella, to have something new to do and
somewhere new to go. Nor did he allow his mind to be weighed down by
feelings of resentment towards his former protégés. He had already forgotten
them. He was floating at last in a diamond-coloured sphere where nothing
was of any significance except his own consciousness of his own incurable
virtue. "I am immortal," Emile sang to himself. Immortality consisted of
ecstatic sensations of unashamed self-love. It was like dying. After death
immortality was swallowed up in eternity. Then one swam into the self-
destroying spheres of a higher and more virtuous being than oneself.
At the end of a year Emile was still dying, still in the grip of immortality.
Everyone with whom he now associated had the same pride of knowing
better than other people the way life yielded to higher and higher activities.
They were mostly, except Jacques and Suzanne, criminals; but rather in the
sense of understanding other people better than they understood themselves
than of doing them harm. On the contrary, their attitude to other people was
tenderly impersonal. They were the guardian spirits of their victims,
educating them with the least possible violence in the larger realities. Indeed,
what other people called crime was only their incurable virtue. They were
good, as he was good, as Suzanne was good, as Jacques was good. They had
ideas. They had liberated themselves from the crude laws of physical habit.
Suzanne was not exactly a criminal; she was more like himself—a soul as
well as an intellect. Jacques, on the other hand, was a simple creature who
had raised himself above the common plane of life to a not much higher plane
of dissatisfaction with life. Strange as it might seem, he was not a criminal
because he was not good enough; he had only become good through an
unnatural effort of intelligence. Criminals were naturally intelligent, and
because they were naturally good. They were above other people by having
grown tired of life before they grew dead; and this capacity for growing
prematurely tired was a moral gift, not, as with Jacques, an intellectual
accomplishment. Emile and Suzanne were even higher up in the sub- eternal
scale than criminals. They were lovers of their own virtue; they prized
themselves as well as their philosophy.
By such reasoning Emile's new life was endeared to him. He gave up his
apartments and made a cheerful home for himself, Suzanne and Jacques in
another quarter. He had far more and far livelier friends than before. He was
no longer called 'poor Emile'. Suzanne in her turn gave up violet-selling.
Jacques studied law and achieved fame and respectability as a criminals'
advocate. He won his cases by the deference with which he publicly treated
the people he defended and by his ability to communicate to juries his
conviction of the superiority of his clients over himself and other people in
general. The coupling of crime and degeneracy was a vulgar fallacy that
infuriated Jacques and Suzanne and Emile and all their circle. Emile even
went so far as to assert that the spiritual mate of degeneracy was not crime
but art. What shocked them most was to hear that someone was trying to go
straight. For this meant moral suicide: the incurable virtue could not be
plucked out without destroying the moral body. Emile, feeling towards his
end an old man's sentimental indulgence towards bygone associations,
hanged himself on a peg in a railway lavatory rather than violate his latter-
day ethics. He had, in fact, accidentally run into one of his old friends and
they had had several drinks with each other, both taking such perverse
pleasure in the encounter as is natural when two people who have once been
friends meet as strangers, expansively indifferent to each other's affairs.
Emile had spoken with ungrudging openness of his new life, the other had
discussed his work with nonchalant vigour, and they had planned to dine
together in a few days, his old friend promising to hunt out in the meantime
other available old friends, to join them.
Suzanne had been upset when he told her about it. She did not scold him,
which was a tragic token that he should have known better. When someone in
their circle did something that he should have had sense enough not to do, he
was expected to redeem himself by suicide. Otherwise they were obliged to
kill him themselves, which meant damnation. Emile recognized that he was
passing into eternity. He went to the dinner knowing that life was all over for
him. He had not clung to life, life had clung to him. Perhaps his old friends
needed him again, and perhaps it would have been gratifying to be of some
use to them. But the time had come to close his heart finally and let his mind
float higher, deaf to mortal appeal, deaf even to the dear private music of his
own immortality—float up into the silent heavens where the individual soul
melted into the nameless master-soul with whom the incurable virtue,
intelligent interest in others, became that rarefied activity: merely to watch.
At dinner with his old friends Emile spoke movingly of his criminal
associates, with difficulty restraining tears. He could see that he bored them
and that they thought him decrepit and silly; but it no longer mattered what
people thought of him, or indeed what he said, or indeed what he did. He
tottered out of the restaurant without saying good-bye, leaving them
convinced of the complete disintegration of a once superior intelligence.
There was nothing to say of him. He was not even 'poor Emile' to them now.
He was nothing. To everyone he was nothing. He got into a taxi and drove
towards the railway station. He felt full of adventure and wondered what
train he should soon be riding in on his way towards nothingness and
commingling with the intelligence superior to all superior intelligences. At
the station he decided that a train was not necessary. It was still more
exciting to let nothingness come and fetch him. He hanged himself with a
fresh white neck-scarf (in the last stage of his life he had dressed even more
fastidiously than before), taking off from a pipe that ran along the wall and
enabled him very conveniently to reach the coat-peg as well as to miss the
floor by a mere stretch of his toes. Nor did death in any way disappoint him.
He was utterly dead and he knew that he was utterly dead and more
sublimely incurable than he had even imagined it possible to be. In fact, the
sublimity of this state would not have been endurable if he had not felt that in
its loneliness he was united with the immense self of selves presiding
quixotically over all wasted endeavour on behalf of others.

DAISY AND VENISON

DAISY was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual
endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not
pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an
imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable.
As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination. She was
what most people with imaginations would call still-witted. True, she had no
money cares. But her life was not a monied life; her happy ways were
obviously not connected with her having no money cares. She lived by
herself in an abandoned house that belonged to nobody and that she had been
able to take possession of without ceremony because nobody wanted it. It
was somewhat in the mountains, above a small, characterless town; she had
found the key in the door and walked in.
Venison was the daughter of the once richest family in that town. This was
her real name, given her by her mother because when she was born she had a
freakish, gamey look, and her father had said, "She'd have an odd taste, not
like ordinary meat." The name had an odd but pretty sound. And Venison had
turned out odd-looking, but pretty—as a spoilt photograph is sometimes quite
pretty. She spoke little, took a morbid interest in herself though she was not
really a thoughtful girl, and stole from people. One day she stole from her
father. When she had stolen from other people he had always laughed heartily
and said, "It brings out the worst in people to have something stolen." But
when she stole from him he said, "Get out of my house, I don't want to live
strange!" 'Living strange' was how he described anything that made people
different from animals. He didn't mind stealing in itself, but he minded
problems and discussions and attitudes and in general all brain-activity. If he
gave Venison a clout on the head for taking his drinking-money out of the
tobacco-jar in which he concealed it from her mother, there would be talk
about the propriety of a father's striking his daughter, about the merits and
demerits of physical punishment for moral offences, about the propriety of
concealing drinking-money in a tobacco jar— about what not? So he merely
told her to get out of his house. To her mother he said, "I'm tired of that girl."
Her mother gave her a hoard of gold pieces that she kept concealed in a sock
in her sewing-basket, and advised her to get Daisy to take her in.
Daisy took her in, almost without noticing that there was a new person in
the house. Daisy continued to do all the work, but treating Venison less as a
guest than as a flaw that had developed in her happiness, which she must
accept uncomplainingly along with it. Venison spent her time sitting in
comfortable positions indoors or out of doors. As she had no clothes but
delicate Sunday ones, it was a pleasure to Daisy to have her about, as she
liked to have illustrated magazines in different places in the house, though
she never read much or bothered much to look at the pictures. Somehow, by
sitting about in comfortable positions in Sunday clothes with nothing to do,
Venison found herself making up stories and then writing them down daintily
in her lap—as a summer visitor writes letters under a sunshade, looking as
nice as possible and not really occupied. Her stories were mostly about
people who did not altogether moral things that turned out well and therefore
seemed, after all, right things to do. She had never travelled and so could
invent all kinds of strange places without being limited, as travelled people
are, by knowledge of certain places only. Nor did she know much about
people. But as she was a timid, somewhat wicked person herself, she thought
of other people as being like herself, only a little bolder. She did not think of
wickedness as wickedness, but rather as the stuff people were made of, like
flesh. Thus, without any knowledge of life or geography, she gave an
impression of wide experience in her stories. With a little training in
grammar and literary style she would undoubtedly have been a successful
author. Her one serious failing was that she could not write above love. She
could not write a story with more than one important character in it, whom
she thought of for the moment as herself; with love there had to be at least
two important characters.
Venison wrote story after story. For a long time this did not affect the
course of her life with Daisy. The stories were packed away in the dog-
basket in which she had brought all her things. There were two air spaces in
the basket and Daisy filled them with putty to keep the dust out, then painting
the putty over with gold paint. The dog-basket was kept in the store-room.
Practically everything in the store-room had gold paint on it somewhere.
Everything in Daisy's house that was not of immediate use went into the
store-room; and being put into the store-room made a treasure of a thing—
this is why practically everything there had gold paint on it. Venison had
never been in the store-room, although it stood between her bedroom and
Daisy's. Venison was not interested in the house she lived in. She was not
even interested in Daisy. The house and Daisy supplied her with comforts:
she was only interested in the comforts. For example, she never went into the
kitchen; she did not know what the shed where the washing was done looked
like inside. It did not worry her that the house or Daisy might have secrets. If
it had secrets, she preferred not to know them. It was more convenient to trust
Daisy. She had handed over her gold pieces to Daisy when she came. She
had not allowed herself to think that Daisy would do anything else with them
than spend them on her comfort. Nor did she ever wonder, during all the
years she lived with Daisy, how long her money had lasted.
Daisy went down into the town every Saturday morning with a donkey and
cart and brought back whatever she thought necessary. Without ever asking
for anything, Venison had all she wanted; at any rate it never occurred to her
to want anything not provided by Daisy. Daisy had a way of shopping that
seemed extravagant; but it was really a very good way, considering how
much money she had. When she went down into the village she would take
with her all the money that a certain glass jar with a screw-top would hold.
She would go from shop to shop, set the jar down on the counter and buy
everything in the shop that might at some time be of some possible use to her
—or to Venison, after she came. If there was change she would say, "No,
give me something for it." She thus accumulated many things of no immediate
use except as storeroom treasures. The money in the jar was, like Venison's
money, in gold pieces. The shopkeepers became quite used to Daisy and her
way of shopping, as it is always easy to become used to people with
eccentricities if they have money. But they would have liked to know exactly
how Daisy came by hers.
How she came by it is really another story. When she first arrived in the
town she had carried only a bundle, which could not have been very heavy:
there were some people who insisted that they had seen her swing it. Nor did
she ever get letters, nor did anyone ever come to see her. People used to say
that she must have found the gold up in the mountains, and that she must have
had information about it before she settled there. And this was indeed the
truth. Her father had been a famous bad-man. When he reached that time of
life when a bad-man is in danger of becoming socially acceptable precisely
because he is a popular legend, he knew that the good old days were over. So
he made his plans accordingly. They had to do principally with Daisy and his
money. He had hidden the money there one night, after having studied the
town all day and decided that his money, if spent there, would never breed
more money: it would remain to the last gold piece his money. He did not
like to think that his money might have a business career and thus get mixed
with other money.
He managed to have a conversation with Daisy without being seen by her
mother. She knew him because her mother used to cut pictures of him out of
the papers and paste them in a book so that she would know her father if she
ever saw him. Her father's first words were, "Not a word of this to your
mother." This thrilled her; to be disconnected from her mother made her real
to herself. Then he had explained about the hiding- hole and the house nearby.
She was to go there as soon as she read of his death in the newspapers, settle
in the house, spend the money only in buying things, and spend it all, and
spend it there. And then he had gone away again, in a mood to get himself
killed in a brawl about honour, for which he cared nothing. Daisy, whose
mother had actually been her father's wife and who had been taught to hope
that she might, though neither pretty nor clever, one day enjoy the dignity to
which she was legally entitled, was emotionally prepared for the demand
made on her. The important point was not the money, but that she had been
recognized by her father. She now had a definite location in the world,
having previously been merely, as it were, an illusion of her mother's. She
stole out of her mother's house on the day that she read of her father's death,
went to the town, found the money—more, it seemed, than she could ever use
up on herself—and settled in the house nearby as her father had directed. She
never forget that it was her father's money she was spending; this was what
made her seem such a happy young woman. Spending it on Venison reminded
her still more strongly that it was her father's money. She did not much like
having Venison about, but accepted her as a sort of miscalculation of her
father's. She liked to see the money go, at any rate; it made her feel that she
was her father's daughter. And it was better to spend it on Venison than to
have it stolen. There was, of course, no real danger of anyone's stealing it.
The people in that town were not very honest, but they were lazy. And
strangers never came there; or if they did, they never lingered there. It was
not an attractive place; it would have been difficult to explain why it was a
place at all. It was called Fingerbend—no one knew why.
When Venison had lived with Daisy for ten uneventful years, a change took
place. Venison's mother died and Venison went to the funeral. She stayed
away two days, and with her return things began to be different. An aunt who
read novels had said to her ironically, "If I were able to live in such
seclusion, I'd become an authoress." And Venison had answered truthfully, "I
have become an authoress. I write stories." Of course her aunt had laughed at
her. She had not insinuated that Venison did not write stories, but that the
stories that she wrote could not be what was meant by literature. Venison
lacked, she said, both education and human sympathy. So when Venison
returned, Daisy had to get out the dog-basket for her, and she read all her
stories over again.
"I haven't any human sympathy, as people who write stories are supposed to
have," she said to Daisy, "but I have instincts. They say it is like being an
animal to rely on your instincts, but if an animal wrote stories about people,
they would be good stories in their way. And my stories are good stories in
their way. When I write them I feel like an animal writing about people."
Daisy did not let Venison's sudden talkativeness upset her. She said calmly,
"You ought to get the stories printed." They chose one of the illustrated
magazines to send them to. The following Saturday Daisy took the dog-basket
to the post-office and sent it off, having made the papers solid inside with an
embroidered sofa cushion out of the store-room. And now for the first time
she learned Venison's last name. Venison showed her the letter that she had
written to the Editor. "I am sending you a lot of stories in a dog-basket. It
opens by pressing on the lock. Yours respectfully, Venison Bride."
The next thing, after Venison's return from her mother's funeral, had to do
with her father. She came back thinking about him. She did not want to live
with him, nor did he want her to. She knew, of course, that he would drink
himself to death now, since he no longer had her mother to hide his drinking
from; but the real reason for this new interest in him was that she would have
liked him to approve of her life with Daisy. Seeing him again made her feel
that she was her father's daughter; she told herself proudly that her lack of
human sympathy came from him. She pressed him to visit her; every Saturday
morning Daisy went to ask when he was coming. Finally, one afternoon he
came. He stayed to supper and let the evening run out without talking of going
down again. Daisy arranged a bed for him in the store-room. In the morning
he was gone before Venison was up. No talk had passed between Venison
and him, but from the pleased, narrow glint in his eyes when he looked at
Daisy she knew that it was Daisy whom he admired, not her, and that if he
ever came up again it would be to see not her but Daisy. She had hoped that
he would approve of her shrewdness in handling Daisy. But it was clear that
he thought her the fool, not Daisy. She admitted to herself that she did not
want him to come up again.
And he came up again, to tease her, knowing that she did not want it. Once
he tried to get Daisy to kiss him, but she hit him on the head with the flat of a
wood-cleaver and knocked him unconscious. Then she bundled him into the
cart—still unconscious—and took him home and put him to bed. By this time
he had revived. He said jokingly that he must get a wood- cleaver to put
himself to sleep with—he was a poor sleeper. They had a friendly talk about
ways of putting oneself to sleep. Daisy always lay for a bit thinking over
what she had done during the day, then she sat up, turned her pillow over, put
her head on it again and went straight to sleep. He always put his head under
the blankets until he felt stifled and had to let the fresh air in, which took
away what little sleepiness he had worked up under the blankets. When he
began to talk about Venison, saying that she was certainly insane, Daisy
started to go. She did not like thinking about Venison except as a sane
household responsibility. "Good-night, Mr. Bride," she said, "I suppose we
won't be seeing you again." After that Venison began to dislike Daisy. She
wanted someone to admire her—as an animal, however wild, feels the need
of admiration, if only from other animals. Daisy kept her clothes going neatly
round the year, but she never looked at her except to be satisfied that her
work was well done. Perhaps Daisy disliked her.
The third break in the uneventfulness of their life together was caused by an
interest in money that Venison brought back with her from her mother's
funeral. For her mother had left her another hoard of gold pieces tied up in
another sock. When she came back she put it on the sitting-room table; and,
looking for it there the next day, she found it gone. "Where's my money?" she
asked Daisy haughtily. "I put it away," Daisy answered in a matter-of-fact
tone. Venison could not object to its being put away. She could not object to
anything. She must have used up more money than both hoards together since
she had been with Daisy. She had everything she wanted. She liked the way
she lived: if there was a still easier way, she was not prepared to take the
trouble to look for it. Here she could at least be as lazy as she pleased
without feeling that she was losing anything by it.
Nevertheless, she came back from her mother's funeral with an interest in
money; money not as something she lacked but as something which, like
admiration, made one feel excited as well as contented. She now wrote more
and more stories. She sat up late at night and grew irritable, like a person
waiting feverishly for a legacy, animated by his own inertia. Daisy made
things easier than ever for her. She was careful about her pencils and brought
her tasty breakfasts in bed. She put up a special shelf in the sitting-room for
the new stories, at a comfortable height, with little cretonne dust-curtains
hanging from a covering shelf on which she stood the new clock—for
Venison had begun to have an interest in time as well as money. She would
go into the kitchen, where Daisy kept her alarm-clock by day, and say, "Have
I time before lunch to start another story?" So Daisy bought her a clock of her
own.
Daisy now found it necessary to read Venison's stories. Venison did not
actually ask her to do this, but Daisy noticed that Venison attached more
importance to the stories than she had in the past; and Daisy always took
trouble with whatever Venison attached importance to. Daisy knew very well
how to read, though she was not fond of reading: one shut out all other
thoughts and went on to the end, without thinking of anything except what one
was reading about, and at the end got up and went back to work cheerfully, as
one always did after interruptions that could not be avoided. Reading
Venison's stories was not different from any of the other things she did for
her. There was nothing more dishonest in Daisy's trying to interest herself in
Venison's stories than in her trying to please her in any other way. In her
general handling of Venison, Daisy was guided only by a desire to live in a
way that her father would have approved of; and it seemed to her that her
father had meant her, most of all, to be steady and calm, and not to be
distracted. She had never treated Venison as anything new. In trying to
interest herself in Venison's stories, she was studying Venison's new appetite
for excitement as she might conscientiously study any sudden change in her
tastes, to avoid irritation on either side at meal-times.
But Venison really wanted to start something new, even though she was, as
she argued with herself, thoroughly contented. She could not help flirting
with her own good luck in being so contented. As soon as Daisy understood
something of what was going on in Venison's mind she began doing fewer
things for her. She continued to be careful about her pencils and to give her
the things she liked to eat; but she tried to make her as unimportant as she
could without seeming to want to drive her away. She no longer interested
herself in Venison's clothes. She kept Venison's room clean, but let it get
untidy and stay untidy. Thus Daisy became confused and uncertain in her
dealings with Venison; she sometimes wondered if she herself should not go
away. She did not want to talk to Venison about things; indeed, she had
nothing to say. She was in a very difficult position as her father's daughter;
her father had not thought of Venison.
 Then Mr. Valentine came. Mr. Valentine was the editor to whom they had
sent the stories. He arrived one summer morning with the dog-basket, smiling
like a clergyman on holiday.
He was too tall and too thin to be handsome, but he had long, thick, unruly
hair that gave him a poetical look. Venison was still in bed, so he spoke to
Daisy, whom he took to be her sister. "I didn't write to your sister about her
stories," he said. "I wanted to see her myself before doing anything about
them. The stories are powerful—er—powerful. Powerful but quite cold.
They need a personality to hang them on—a little publicity, perhaps.
Wonderful style. Ruthless. Simple. Almost too simple. Quaint." "She has lots
more," Daisy said. And, kindly, "Will you have a cup of tea?" "This is going
to be great fun," said Mr. Valentine. "Your sister must be an extraordinary
woman." He put the dog-basket on the table and pressed hard on the lock
with a knowing wink at Daisy. "I got the trick all right," he laughed. He
patted the basket as if it were something of his own, saying, "I've grown very
fond of it." Daisy noticed that it had had hard use. The gilded pieces of putty
had fallen out. He untied the rope and took out a gramophone, a box of
chocolates and a comb. He combed his hair with the comb and left it lying on
the table. Then he untied the ribbon round the chocolates and offered them to
Daisy. "Perhaps Venison would like one," she said. Venison was still asleep.
"Would you like a chocolate?" Daisy said, tapping her on the shoulder. "The
Editor has come." Venison woke up and took a chocolate sleepily. "The
Editor has come," repeated Daisy. "Oh, yes, the Editor," she mumbled. She
did not seem surprised, as if she had known all along that he would come.
Mr. Valentine had by now started playing the gramophone and was walking
about the room smiling to himself. "She took a chocolate," Daisy reported. "I
suppose she will be down soon." Mr. Valentine chuckled. Daisy cleared
away his tea-cup and put his comb back in the basket. He took it out and used
it again, leaving it again on the table. Then he put on another record. Daisy
went up to her room and packed her clothes. She left the house. She went to
the hole in the rock where the gold pieces were hidden. When she had got
them all out, she found at the end of the hole a wad of bank-notes of high
denominations. In a way, her father had thought of Venison, after all; he had
allowed for some miscalculation. She tucked the notes into her blouse. In the
kitchen she put the gold pieces into a deep water-jug and carried it up into
Venison's room. Venison was getting into her most elaborate dress, and Daisy
helped her, having set the jug on the floor where Venison would not notice it
too soon. Then Daisy went downstairs and out of the house. Mr. Valentine
was still playing the gramophone, walking about the room and smiling to
himself.
Daisy went out of the house, down the mountain, and out of the town. There
was no train at that hour, so she hired the only taxi in the town and drove to
the nearest large railway station. Here she took the first train that went a long
way. She wanted to go as far from Fingerbend as she could without spending
too much money on the fare. Her object now was to make her money last as
long as she lasted. In Fingerbend she had never wanted change when she
went shopping. Now she must try to get as much change back as possible.
The train brought her to a city. In a city there were bargains and one could not
avoid getting change back when one went shopping: bargain prices always
came in irregular figures. Daisy grew into a very economical, very old
woman and forgot all about Venison. Venison had never been more to her
than a miscalculation of her father's that she had to be dutiful about and let
take its course. When Mr. Valentine arrived, she had known that its course
was finished as far as she was concerned.
Venison came down into the sitting-room carrying the chocolate-box and
munching a second chocolate. "Ah!" said Mr. Valentine, staring at Venison
greedily, "Here we are!" Venison stared back without a smile and without a
word of greeting. She sat down in a chair turned somewhat away from him.
He picked up another chair and placed it opposite hers, leaning towards her
over the back of it. "I haven't come before," he said, "because I have been
thinking about you. You are an extraordinary woman. We must only be patient
at first about money." At the word 'money' Venison smiled at him for the first
time. "The deuce!" he cried admiringly. He went over to the table, put on a
record and walked about the room, rubbing his hands together. Venison got up
and took down the stories behind the curtain, laying them on the table as if
they were more his affairs than hers. "You just leave it all to me," he said.
"There's plenty of time. Do you think your sister would mind my staying here
a few days? I've got to learn all about you." Venison went to tell Daisy, but
Daisy was not in the house. Perhaps she was in the washing-shed; Venison
did not trouble to look. Mr. Valentine assumed that he might stay, though
Venison said nothing. He seemed to find her silence intoxicating. "And now,"
he said, pressing down the lid of the gramophone emphatically, "what about a
little love?"
Venison ran upstairs to her bedroom to think. She was not sure how she
ought to react. Why not a little love? It need not interfere with anything if one
thought only of oneself. That was one of the advantages of being a woman:
one didn't have to love, only let oneself be loved. Perhaps love was a more
practical way of being worldly, while living a retired, lazy life, than writing
stories. She looked into her mirror and decided to change into a more
sensible frock. Then she noticed the water- jug full of gold pieces. She knew
immediately that Daisy had gone away for good. She went downstairs,
picked up the pile of stories from the table and put them into the kitchen
stove.
Mr. Valentine was outside, triumphantly planning his next step. She put the
gramophone in the dog-basket, and the comb, and what was left of the
chocolates, and carried it out to him. "You can keep the dog-basket," she said
with a sneer. "Now go along." She shut the door without waiting for an
answer.
Venison went to live in her father's house, now hers. He had, as she had
expected, drunk himself to death. She put the house in order and ran it on a
dignified scale, keeping two maids. She did not marry. With her money, her
house, her maids, her proud looks, and her air of sitting in unbroken serenity
at a private counting-table, she was able to keep going without scandalous
misadventure a sequence of passionless love affairs with respectable men in
the town. She lived long, and yet when she died she was not noticeably an
old woman. The town gave her a splendid funeral. She had left it all her
money, to be spent on preserving its character. As they were not quite sure
what this meant, they were only too pleased to spend as much of the money as
they could on burying her in an appropriately grateful manner. No one had a
word to say against her, not even the wives. She had never let anything or
anyone disturb her daily peace; and such people do not disturb the daily
peace of others.
Sometimes Venison thought about Daisy. Suppose Daisy had not gone
away? Then she would not have had the money, and the long, quiet
excitement of living a life that was really her own. Had Daisy gone away for
her sake, because she had suddenly felt that she, Venison, was entitled to a
life that was really all her own? No, she decided, Daisy had gone away
because she had suddenly felt that she, Daisy, was entitled to a life that was
really all her own. How alike she and Daisy were —except that she would
never have gone away first or left the money behind. Venison smiled to
herself good-naturedly whenever she thought of Daisy—as a dog wags his
tail good- naturedly at a cat that he has chased up a tree, and then turns to
finish her supper with friendly relish, not at all upset by the obscure way in
which she watches him.
 THREE TIMES ROUND

LOTUS was a girl with two distinct sides to her nature, and this showed in her
looks. When a girl resembles both her mother and her father it usually
happens that she makes a disturbing impression on people; just as it is
disturbing when there is moonlight and sunlight at the same time. Lotus had
her father's long thin nose and small, tight mouth. But her eyes were her
mother's, and the shape of her body was her mother's. She seemed a pleasant-
looking girl to people when they first met her, but when they got to know her
they thought her looks rather sinister. And it was the same with her character
as with her appearance. Yet Lotus did not mean to seem sinister. She did not
mean to be different from ordinary people. But she liked having adventures
all by herself, which gave her a secretive manner, since she said nothing
about them.
A man called Sam was in love with Lotus. Sam was a sensible sort of
person. "If only she had an adventure that would have some effect on her," he
would say to her mother, "she'd stop behaving like an Unseen Presence."
"Yes," her mother would agree, "she's exactly as her father was, always
wrapped up in herself, but expecting everyone to be nice to her, and
surprised when they're not." Lotus's adventures had no effect on her because
her part in them consisted merely in watching what was done and listening to
what was said. She did not take them seriously enough to be affected by
them. She did not take anything very seriously. This was why she liked
having adventures all by herself, with no one about who knew her to think
that she was not showing sufficient interest. It made her unhappy when
people thought her rude or egotistical or secretive, when actually she was
only being careful not to pretend. It seemed strange to her that a sensible
person like Sam, of whom she was really fond, did not understand that she
too was a sensible person in her way. Her way could not be a man's way.
When men were sensible they busied themselves seriously about a few things
that were not in themselves serious. Sensible women merely left everything
as it was. Men always had to exaggerate the importance of things, no matter
how sensible they were, if it were only playing golf or being in business or
having certain opinions.
But Sam said that he would not marry her until he had seen her shed tears.
Her mother thought that it might be a good idea to send her round the world.
So Lotus started on a trip round the world. In Paris she met a woman called
Grace who took a positive interest in other people's lives and made money
by acting as intermediary between people who were in a disadvantageous
position and those who had some advantage over them. She knew how to take
both sides and make the side that had the upper hand even more grateful to
her than the other. When Lotus met her she was about to set out on a mission
to a German university town for someone who wanted a certificate in
anatomy that he was not entitled to from a professor with whom he had
boarded and to whom he owed a lot of money. The professor also had against
him the seduction of his daughter Louise, a professional masseuse, whom the
student had promised to take with him to Paris. They were to open a body-
culture school together in his uncle's hotel. The young man had seduced the
daughter, who was a good deal older than himself, because, from a business
point of view, it was important that she should feel young. Being in business
with a woman older than oneself often led to complications unless she felt
that the relation was not purely a business one. But his uncle had quarrelled
with his mother, who ran a beauty-salon in the hotel, because he had found
that for some time she had been cheating him: he was supposed to receive a
certain percentage of her profits in return for charging her no rent, and she
had been concealing the full amount of her profits from him. Maurice, the
young man, had taken his mother's side, since she had a better business-head,
for his purposes, than his uncle. And so he had suddenly left the university,
telling Louise that he would send for her later. He and his mother opened a
body-culture school together, but he had not sent for Louise: a man could not
be in business with two women. His mother now wanted Maurice to have a
certificate in anatomy that she could frame and hang in the waiting-room. He
was still a year short of his Physikum when his mother called him to her, but
Grace was sure that she could get some sort of certificate for him—anything
in German would do.
The professor ran a pension with his daughter, and Grace and Lotus went
there to stay. They made friends with Louise, and she told them in confidence
about Maurice. Grace told her that she knew Maurice, letting it seem a
coincidence. She made Louise feel sorry for him by describing how
tyrannical his mother was and how he had struggled with her over Louise,
having finally to give her up. This pleased Louise; Grace made her feel that
she had really had a love-affair. Grace also explained about the certificate,
how his mother, though the cause of his having left so suddenly, treated him
without respect. A certificate to hang in the waiting-room would have made
all the difference, but of course Maurice was too miserable about Louise and
his unpaid bill to write to the professor and ask for one. Louise formed a
conspiracy with Grace to get a certificate of some sort from her father. Grace
was to pretend that she was a secret emissary from Maurice to Louise, and
Louise would pretend that she and Maurice had been in secret
correspondence with each other ever since he had left.
Under the impression that Maurice had been working hard all that time in
order to be, one day, a self-supporting son-in- law, the professor went to a
notary and signed a large testimonial on parchment. Before going off with the
certificate, Grace had a long private talk with the professor in which she,
though apparently the trusted friend of both Maurice and his mother, strongly
advised against the marriage, in his and Louise's interest. The professor was
so affected by her frankness that he gave her a very pretty jacinth, worth
about five hundred marks, out of his collection of gems, largely gifts from
Eastern students who had lodged with him and been unable to pay their bills.
Grace left on good terms with everyone. Lotus planned to meet her in a
month in Cairo, where Maurice's uncle would then be taking a holiday and
where she hoped to be able to produce in him a kindlier attitude towards his
nephew and his sister-in-law. Grace also had a sister in Cairo who was
married to a Belgian business-man from whom she had run away several
times, but to whom she was always forced to return because, since one of her
eyes was a glass eye, no one stayed in love with her very long—though apart
from this she was an exceptionally beautiful woman.
Lotus stayed on with Louise. Louise told her about the different kinds of
deformities that she had worked on in a Viennese clinic before her mother
had died and she had had to come home to look after her father. Louise also
told her about the eccentricities of some of the students. In the basement of
the pension a secret society met one night every week, and very peculiar
things went on, to which her father did not object, however, because they
were done in a scientific spirit. A Norwegian, who was known as a fighter
whom nobody had ever been able to knock down, would let himself be
knocked down by each of the members in turn. A Japanese, who was known
as a morbidly shy, devious character, would take off all his clothes and get
himself so entangled in dozens of yards of tape that the other members would
have to help him disentangle himself. Lotus met him once at a tea at the
pension. He did not seem to be so shy with women as with men. He told her
how serpent-soup was made in Japan. "The serpents are immured in water
that is to boil and the pot is covered with a lid for making them put their
heads through little holes when the water boils. So we slice off their heads
and the soup is edible." He wanted to draw her a picture of it, and she looked
in her purse for a pencil but could not find one. "No," he said politely, "the
only pencil you would possess would be a lip-pencil." When Lotus said that
this was a very rude way to speak, he replied sadly, "You must forgive me, I
am only learning everything." Lotus decided that after Cairo she would go to
Japan, and wrote to her mother to say that this was what she would do. The
Japanese attracted her as people who did not take things very heartily.
In Cairo Grace had succeeded in bringing about a reconciliation between
Maurice and his uncle. She had accounted for his mother's fraud by
explaining that Maurice had got himself into trouble with the daughter of a
professor, and that he had not wanted his uncle to know about it, and that his
mother had had to send him money. The uncle was touched by the mother's
loyalty, by Maurice's having hidden his trouble from him, by Grace's
disinterested appreciation of the difficulties of all three. He was sorry that he
had been so severe and sent a handsome cheque to Maurice. He hoped that
Grace would stop at his hotel as his personal guest whenever she was in
Paris. Lotus enjoyed listening to Grace's experiences as she enjoyed sitting in
hotel lounges watching people come and go and overhearing conversations.
In Cairo Lotus and Grace and Grace's sister went on excursions together in a
car driven by a chauffeur called Michael. Michael said his father was a
Greek nobleman and his mother a rich American. His mother had divorced
her husband, paying him a generous yearly income and keeping her title. She
had disinherited Michael because he did things which disgraced the family
name. She was very proud of the family name, prouder of it than his father,
who also did things which disgraced it. She lived at Belgrade in a large
house and entertained foreign newspaper correspondents and people from
different embassies, and was said to be a force to be reckoned with in
Balkan politics. Michael was an entertaining talker. He knew all the waiters
in Cairo and could gossip competently about the people who spent their
winters there—half-rich people disappointed with themselves for not being
greater celebrities than they were, and who had a petulant, jealous attitude to
the other members of their class whom they met there.
Their friendship with Michael ended in a motor accident caused by a
handless beggar who jumped on the running- board and waved his inflamed
stumps in their faces. Grace's sister, who was sensitive about such things,
screamed, and Michael looked round, and the car ran into another car, killing
one of the occupants, who were Egyptians. Michael and Grace and Grace's
sister somehow made Lotus feel that she was the rich one among them, and so
she took upon herself the responsibility of settling with the victim's relatives.
This used up so much of her money that she gave up the idea of going to
Japan. She could get home more cheaply by going back the same way that she
had come. She did not, however, want to explain to her mother why she was
not going to Japan; it always embarrassed her to discuss herself or her doings
in detail. She stayed on in Cairo for a while, hoping that her mother would
assume that she was on her way to Japan. Her mother would not think it
strange that she did not write. She always thought it rather strange in fact that
Lotus wrote to her at all; she did not understand that Lotus wrote only
because she did not want to seem unkind, and that she did not write often
because, no matter how little she wrote, whatever she wrote seemed like a
lie.
Lotus arrived home suddenly, without having let her mother know
beforehand. When she heard her mother tell people that she had been to
Japan, she did not contradict her. In Cairo Lotus had met a missionary on her
way back from China with a trunkful of oriental Christmas gifts to sell to her
friends, and had bought from her a string of grotesquely large Chinese
crystals. Lotus's mother accepted these as a proof that Lotus had been to
Japan. Lotus had meant them to be a gift for her mother; but her mother said,
"Oh, I could not wear anything so mysterious-looking, they're much more
suitable for you." Lotus took them back and wore them occasionally, although
she could not see why, if they were mysterious-looking, they were more
suitable for her than for her mother. She was not conscious of making a
mystery of herself. Her mother's character puzzled her much more than her
own; she seemed to worry so much about her and yet not to love her, as if
there were some secret reason why she could not. Perhaps, Lotus thought, she
should never have had a child. Perhaps she herself should never have been.
Certainly she did not feel at ease in the world. But did anyone?
Lotus's mother and Sam noticed very little change in Lotus, beyond her
seeming less sensitive to what people thought of her. It was true, indeed, that
travelling always had this effect on people. "I don't like to talk like this about
Lotus," her mother said to Sam. "A mother should have some illusions about
her daughter, otherwise it's difficult to play the mother in an emergency. But
do you know, Sam, I think she's capable of doing something really wicked.
It's a short step from indifference to immorality." Sam by this time had given
up hope of Lotus's ever softening and was thinking of marrying a girl whom
he knew to be in love with him. He was not in love with her; this would
make it easier for him to divorce her if Lotus should, one day, undergo a
miraculous change. "The important thing nowadays," he said to Lotus's
mother, "is to keep sane. It used to be an asset to be a little insane, just as
everybody used to respect geniuses. But now that everyone knows the causes
of insanity it makes one look foolish." Lotus's mother almost wished that her
daughter would have something happen to her to spoil her appearance. Some
people could only be affected through their vanity; none of the things, like
time, that helped to mould the character of ordinary people seemed to affect
Lotus.
When, during the next few years, it became clear that Lotus was developing
a goitre, her mother began to wonder whether it was not dangerous to think
about a person as much as she and Sam had thought about Lotus. And so, as
soon as the goitre was operated on and Lotus was well enough to travel, her
mother sent her on a second trip round the world. This time Lotus went
straight to Vienna. Louise's stories about the cases that she had treated in
Vienna made it seemed a city of cases; the ugly scar on her throat made her
feel, as she had never felt before, that she herself was a case. She had never
before considered herself the kind of person to whom things happened.
Perhaps she did not understand herself—or the world. Yet there did not seem
to be much to understand; it did not seem that much happened. Or, at any rate,
whatever happened was all over so soon.
In Vienna she took a room with a Frau Ritter, who did detective work for
the police against small shops that evaded city regulations. Frau Ritter was
very tall and very fat—a gloomy combination in a person from whom one
naturally expected amusement as a foreign landlady. Her extreme tallness and
fatness made her seem more like a murderess than a foreign landlady. Her
accounts of the tricks that she caught shopkeepers in were not only boring to
Lotus but also vexed her strangely. She would have liked to be able to feel
sorry for people. For instance, there was the drunken old woman who had
behaved in a dirty way in a tram-car. The conductor had put her off, and no
one had been even interested enough to grin. Why had no one been interested
in the old woman? Why had the old woman not been interested in herself?
She had got off in a daze and waited for the next tram-car. Lotus herself had
not been really interested in the old woman, but troubled by her lack of
interest. The fact that she did not take things seriously now seemed to her
tragic; the world seemed a tragic world because there was nothing in it that
she could take seriously—nothing that took hold. The way she dressed now
gave the impression that she was a person who had seen tragedy, though not
been touched by it herself. She had to wear grotesquely large necklaces to
hide her scar—she was pleased now to have the Chinese crystals—and
grotesquely patterned tunics to go with the necklaces.
Also living in Frau Ritter's flat was a poor Hungarian chemist who worked
in a patent-medicine factory. He slept on a sofa in the dining-room and had to
get up early to free the room for breakfast. He was allowed to keep his books
in the china-cupboard because this gave a tone of respectability to the flat.
The police were always suspicious of anyone who took in lodgers in Vienna.
Frau Ritter had had to ask the young Czecho-Slovakian couple who occupied
her most expensive room to have their meals in their own room: they were
not married. Yet they were quite, polite people, of a higher social class than
Frau Ritter and most of her other guests. It was not clear exactly what
relations existed between Frau Ritter and the Hungarian. He spent much time
in her room, but it was known that he was trying to cure her of warts on the
head, under the hair, that had once been cut away by a doctor but had grown
again. The Hungarian's relations with Frau Ritter did not, however, prevent
him from attaching himself to Lotus in a comradely way. With Frau Ritter he
was always gay and servile, but often when he was with Lotus he wept over
himself proudly. "You remind me that my life is a failure, a tragic failure," he
would say. "It is something to be able to feel at least that." He had not meant
to be a chemist; but his father had been a village doctor and as a boy he had
helped him make up medicines. His father had wanted him to be a doctor. He
had chosen to be only a chemist: a chemist could be more scientific than a
doctor. His real interest was not chemistry but Magyar origins; most of the
books in the china-cupboard were on Magyar origins. But doctors—at least
some—made money, and chemists did not. If he had money he would go to
Tibet; the keys to many racial mysteries were hidden there, in monastery
manuscripts. There was one monastery where the monks gave learned
visitors a drug in their food that made their minds work so slowly that they
sometimes spent years deciphering a dozen pages or so.
The Hungarian did not expect Lotus to interest herself seriously in his
disappointed ambitions, and yet he did expect her to wear a serious look
while he spoke to her. The effect on her of this attitude was that instead of
thinking about herself or about him she thought only about her bearing. Sam
used to call her an Unseen Presence. There was not much difference, she
found, between being an Unseen and a Seen Presence. When she was what
Sam called an Unseen Presence she had listened to or watched minutely
things that she did not take seriously. Now she neither listened nor watched
but merely allowed herself to be used as a symbolic statue allows itself to be
used. No one would call a symbolic statue an Unseen Presence, though the
person the statue was supposed to represent was not actually present in it. A
symbolic statue was a Tragic Presence and yet a Seen Presence. It would like
to be sympathetic, but it was not really interested; and yet it was there. If, on
the other hand, it moved about among people as if of its own accord,
listening to what they said or watching what they did, it would not be there.
Lotus now understood that in her younger days she had made the mistake of
letting herself seem to move about among people of her own accord. And she
owed this new understanding of herself as much to the Hungarian as to the
fact that having a goitre had somehow brought her to wonder whether, after
all, there was not something about herself she ought to try to understand. The
Hungarian was the first person who had ever made use of her. She realized
that she liked being made use of without having to do anything of her own
accord. Was it presumptuous of her to think of herself as a symbolic statue?
A statue was only made of stone, whereas she had a living body. And by
symbolic she only meant being made use of in a purely theatrical way.
From Vienna Lotus set out for Tibet. In Tibet she found a monastery where
sickened Anglo-Indians went for their health. It was a very large monastery
and most of it was in ruins. The monks lived in the ruined part. It was not
safe to go into the ruined part, she was told, not only because walls were
always collapsing but because the monks did not like to be seen. A very old
Indian who never spoke, either because he was under a vow not to speak or
because he could not, was in charge of the part where the Anglo-Indians
stayed. Lotus only saw him once—when he showed her the room she might
have. The room was completely unfurnished. A yellow-faced army chaplain,
who had a room near hers, got his servant to find her a bed and invited her to
have her meals with him: otherwise she would have to prepare her own food
in the kitchen with all the servants—people never came there without their
servants. His servant had made quite a pleasant dining-room out of a large
tower room, and many of the other visitors had their meals brought there. One
morning after breakfast—the other visitors did not, as a rule, take their
breakfasts in the tower-room—the army chaplain suddenly kissed Lotus on
the forehead. His servant came in at this moment; and knowing that he would
tell the other servants and they their masters, the army chaplain immediately
threw himself out of the window. He was picked up dead and Lotus had to
undergo an unofficial cross- examination by a judge who happened to be one
of the visitors. The judge's wife wrote a mysteriously insinuating letter to
Lotus's mother, having found Lotus's home address on her passport, which the
judge had asked to see.
This experience was not a painful one for Lotus. The people at the
monastery had made use of her, which was gratifying. They were bored, and
the incident had given them something to talk about. They were depressed,
and it had cheered them up to take sides in the matter. One side called her an
adventuress, the other side said that she was the victim of circumstances. To
both sides she was an instrument of emotional exercise. Before the incident
everyone there had been afraid of saying something which might irritate
someone else, since they all suffered from nerves; so they got no good out of
one another's company. In talking about Lotus and the army chaplain's death
they emerged from the whispering sick-room atmosphere of their poor
exacerbated minds. Even the army chaplain had made use of her; those who
took her side said that it was just as well that he had killed himself. It had
apparently been clear to everyone that he was on the verge of a moral
collapse—a thing that often happened with clergymen who had worn
themselves out trying to preserve the morals of their countrymen in bad
climates.
Lotus's mother died while she was in Tibet; but Sam had seen the letter
written by the judge's wife. When Lotus reached home again Sam was living
in her mother's house. Her mother had left him the house and all her money;
when she knew that she was going to die she had made him promise to marry
Lotus and look after her, no matter what she was like when she came back. In
fulfillment of this promise he had got a divorce soon after Lotus's mother
died. Lotus was only too pleased to marry him and had strong hopes of
making him happy, now that she was so different from what she had been.
She was ready to do anything he might want of her; if he wanted her to shed
tears she could shed tears.
But Sam asked nothing of Lotus: he had promised her mother that he would
expect nothing of her. He did not notice that Lotus wanted to be made use of.
He discouraged other people from expecting anything of her—in the idea that
this was the kindest possible way to treat her. Lotus could not bring herself to
tell Sam that she was different from what she had been. It would have been
impossible for her to explain this to anyone; and without some explanation,
indeed, it would have been difficult for anyone to discover in what way she
was different from what she had been. Although she no longer sought out
trivial adventures in the old way, and dressed more elegantly than she had
when she was younger, people took these differences to mean merely that she
was older than she had been. They could not help seeing that she bore herself
with more poise than before; but they attributed this to the sophisticating
influence of foreign travel, rather than to a change of character.
Then Lotus began having a baby. She looked forward to being a mother. In
motherhood one was made use of; and the more passive one was, the better a
mother one was considered. But Sam decided that the baby would probably
encourage further morbidities in her, and that, in any case, she would
probably not be a good mother to it. And so, soon after the baby was born, he
urged her to leave it to the care of a nurse and to take another trip round the
world. She could not bring herself to explain that she did not want to go
away from the baby, or from Sam himself. Perhaps in sending her away Sam
was putting her to some use.
She went to Paris and looked up Grace. Grace introduced her to a Catalan
called Luis, who was professionally a hairdresser, socially an adventurer.
He was very small and thin and pale; but he had eyes that shone like little
purple apples. He would do anything for the sake of a joke, no matter how
infamous. Indeed, he enjoyed being known as a rascal. People who were
known as virtuous and respectable characters often got into trouble over
trifles, because everyone suspected them of being hypocrites and so watched
them carefully. Luis never got into trouble, although he was always involved
in some illicit money-making scheme—half fraud, half farce. And as his
schemes never got beyond the theoretical stage, he had all the pleasure of
being a rascal, and none of the hard work. Whenever he needed money to
live on he would work as a hairdresser for a month or so. His money-making
schemes always started in the conversations he carried on to amuse his
customers. "That wouldn't be a bad idea, eh?" he would say jokingly. Then
afterwards he would say to himself seriously, "No, that wouldn't be a bad
idea."
Lotus and Luis became inseparable. Luis said, "I do not think of you as a
woman but as a piece of statuary. For a woman I would not choose a piece of
statuary. I need you to give a touch of splendour to my life. I would not
expect or want this from a real woman. Dante's Beatrice was not a woman,
but a piece of statuary. Yet without her he would have been a mere
adventurer. Without her The Divine Comedy would have been a comedy.
Without you I would be contemptible. It is a matter of superstition. Without
superstitions all men are contemptible." Lotus asked no more than to be
talked to in this way. She let Luis take charge of her money and her
movements. They travelled from place to place together; he managed
everything for her as if she were a prima donna. Sam seemed only too
pleased to send her more and more money. She could not bring herself to ask
many questions about the baby, and he said little about it.
In Africa Luis got into trouble with the French authorities by mixing in with
the natives and taking sides in their quarrels, thus confusing judicial
procedure. At the Cape he fell in with a gang of Portuguese betting-men and
gave them an idea for making money out of bogus races. The men were
caught by the police and put the blame on Luis. He did not deny that the idea
was his. "But how was I to know that they took me seriously?" he said to the
police, shrugging his shoulders. From the Cape Lotus and Luis went to Japan.
This was Luis's idea; but Lotus had always wanted to go to Japan. On the
boat Luis got into a quarrel with a Spaniard to whom he insisted talking
Catalan. "If you talk to me in your language," he said, "I have the right to talk
to you in mine." One night when both of them were very drunk they had a
fight on deck and Luis somehow fell overboard. No one had been present,
and so it was impossible to accuse the Spaniard of having thrown him over.
Lotus, at any rate, was not sorry. She felt that now at last there was a chance
of her becoming a definite personality. She was old enough and she was
alone. All her unhappiness had really been due to a fear of being a definite
kind of person; for it generally happened that a definite kind of person was a
wrong kind of person. The sensible people in the world were not particular
kinds of persons; they did not harden. But being sensible was not the whole
story; there was also the problem of one's personality—if one had one. It was
curious that in avoiding being a definite kind of person she had hardened into
a piece of statuary. But that was over now. She had died a sort of death with
Luis; her fear had died, the fear of being herself. With Luis she had actually
been nothing, and she had learned that she did not like to be nothing. She
wanted to be made use of, but she also wanted to be something real. She had
died a sort of death with Luis, and perhaps now she would begin to live.
And now she was on her way to Japan, and for a long time she had had a
wish to go to Japan, she did not know why. It was not merely a capricious
notion that the Japanese student had put into her head, or the feeling that the
Japanese were a doll-like people who, like herself, did not take things
heartily and yet did things in a serious way. It was more like fate, as if in
Japan something would happen to her that would make the rest of her life
easy. Was this not the feeling that one got from Japanese prints? They were
complicated and yet simple: complicated as far as they went, as if the rest,
all that was left out of the picture, was easy. For a long time, however, it
seemed that nothing was going to happen to her in Japan. She did not, in fact,
feel that she was in Japan—or in any particular place. She lived in a large
European hotel and rarely went out. There were little shops in the hotel
where she could buy everything she needed, and all her friendships were
with people staying at the hotel—people who, like herself, did not quite
know why they were there and had no immediate reason for going away.
They did not talk to one another, but merely sat in the same room together
telling themselves that they were in Japan. The strongest emotion that
travellers feel in Japan, without any disrespect to it, is that they have had
enough of travelling. "This is the place where you turn back," it seems to say.
Sometime soon they will be home again. Sitting with these people, Lotus too
felt that sometime soon she would be home again. Afterwards she could not
remember how long she had waited in Japan for the time to go home. She
never heard from her hotel friends again. The hotel had been badly damaged
during the earthquake; the ceiling of her room had fallen in on her. Perhaps
some of them had been injured too. But they would all be home by now.
Sam came to Japan and took Lotus home. "The rest will be easy now," she
said to herself. But she was very slow in getting well. "Soon I shall be well
and really begin to live," she kept saying to herself. She lay on a sofa all day
long and shed many tears—she thought them happy tears. Her little boy was
now six years old and sat with her a great deal, asking her questions about
the places she had been to. She could not give him very accurate answers, but
he did not seem to mind. It seemed to please him that his mother was a
stranger; and she remained a stranger—invalids are always strangers to the
people about them. And Sam behaved tenderly to her. He spent as much of
his time at home as he could, talking or reading to her. "How lonely he must
have been all this time," she said to herself. She did not know that Sam spent
so much time with her because when she was alone she cried to herself and
the doctor said that this was not good for her. It did not occur to her to think
that Sam might be sorry for her; she was not sorry for herself— soon she
would really begin to live. She felt, indeed, that she had begun to live
already. She did not notice that she was dying.
II: Stories of Ideas

REALITY AS PORT HUNTLADY

l
DAN the Dog came to the town of Port Huntlady with two friends, Baby and
Slick. Port Huntlady was not a town as other towns are towns. It was rather
like a place where one felt a town might one day be, or where one felt that
perhaps there had once been a town. And yet, breathing in the air of Port
Huntlady, people fancied that they were breathing in vitality. Perhaps nothing
had ever happened there: perhaps they would make things happen there.
Port Huntlady was a seaside town; but its peculiar influence seemed to
come rather from the houses than from the sea. The character of a place is
determined not so much by its climate as by the kind of houses that have been
built in it, which means the kind of people that have lived in it, which, in
turn, means the degree to which the place may be said to be static, or unique,
or apart from the rest of the world, which, in turn, depends on other things—
on the people who have not gone there to live, for instance. It is odd that the
places where people go to live—really live—should seem out of the world;
and yet this is so, and especially so in the case of Port Huntlady, where
people not only went to live, but from which people went away again, back
to other places, to be busy and die.
The kind of people who did not go to Port Huntlady were exactly those
whose minds were entirely given up to being busy and dying. Such people
often go away for a rest to places, but Port Huntlady was not such a place,
nor did such people go to it. The kind of people who went to Port Huntlady
were those whose minds were divided between being busy and dying, on the
one hand, and living—really living—on the other. They went there with a
feeling that quite possibly they might not go back again to where they had
come from. They were different from ordinary people in that they were
honourable people. That is, they were not sure which was the right thing to
do: to be busy and die like other people, or to live—really live. They were
not sure which sort of people to be: people who thought only about
themselves, or people who thought about things in general. And this partial
interest in things in general, combined with the peculiar close influence of
Port Huntlady, made them feel that Port Huntlady was a place where things
might happen; not the things that happened in the world proper, which were
personal experiences, but universal experiences, such as the end of the
world, or great turning-points in the course of human events. Such things, they
felt, really meant living; and to such things they felt that they owed at least a
part of their attention.
People came to Port Huntlady for the good of their souls, as they said: to
give their minds up to the really important things. And while they remained in
Port Huntlady they all wore a look of intense interest in certain undefined
really important things. But in the end they always went away because they
were not fatedly intense people. Little by little their intensity began to trouble
them as much as their lack of it had troubled them in the world proper. But,
indeed, they were neither so intense in Port Huntlady as they imagined
themselves, nor so lacking in intensity as they had previously accused
themselves of being. So they went back to the world proper in a very even
frame of mind. They went back promising themselves that one day they
would return to Port Huntlady—really to live; but without feeling any longer
that, if they did not one day begin really to live, they would, necessarily, be
missing very much. And as they soon forgot Port Huntlady, they naturally
forgot their promise to themselves.
The houses in Port Huntlady were, on the whole, commodious, earnestly
built, and tempered with familiar comforts and a little discreet decoration.
Nearly all of them were nearly always occupied by temporarily permanent
residents. Only one was occupied by a really permanent resident who was
really entirely interested in the really important things. This person, because
of her real permanence in Port Huntlady, was locally known as Lady Port-
Huntlady. Besides her own house, she owned many other houses in Port
Huntlady, all of which she rented to temporarily permanent residents. The
rest of the houses were owned by previous really permanent residents who
rented them through an agent called 'Cards'. Cards was the only permanent
native of Port Huntlady. His family had settled there a long time ago, when
Port Huntlady was only an experimental pleasure-colony. They had come
there experimentally, without any money, knowing that in newly sprung
places there are equal chances of good luck and bad luck— while a properly
matured place is either all good luck, or all bad luck. And so they had
established themselves in an experimental structure on the beach made out of
a small pleasure- yacht that someone had left behind; they had waited. And as
Port Huntlady never really matured, they had equal turns of good luck and
bad luck—always waiting. Nothing, indeed, had come their way except the
boats that people left behind when they went away, though more and more
were left behind as Port Huntlady grew, from a pleasure-colony, into a place
where people went to live permanently.
For this transformation involved no drastic change in the character of the
place—commercially speaking: it became a place where people went to live
permanently because it had never really been a pleasure-colony. The boats
that people left behind did not bring the family great wealth, but they gave
them a continuity of interest in the place as a centre of events. It takes very
little, after all, to make a place interesting to people whose interest in it is
purely personal. Some of the boats were useful in enlarging their home on the
beach; others they sold to new temporarily permanent residents; many
warped and rotted in the sun while waiting to be sold again. In short, there
was a slow family activity which, by the time Cards was, at least noticeably,
the only one of them left, made him the town's most substantial resident—
apart from Lady Port-Huntlady (although 'substantial' is not an adjective that
can be appropriately applied to her). In addition to this private substantiality,
Cards was also, as has been explained, the official house-agent of Port
Huntlady. And he had also come to own a motor-boat in which he took
parties to Foolish Island. No one lived on Foolish Island; it was merely a
place to go to from Port Huntlady. People went there with lunches and came
back. Lady Port-Huntlady and Cards were in business together, and the
business had something to do with Foolish Island. This was all people knew,
and all there seemed to know.
Port Huntlady houses were never spring-cleaned, repaired or remodelled,
except by their successive occupants. This system, however, maintained them
in a reasonable condition of habitability, since people always began living in
them with the idea of living in them permanently. Improvements and
remodellings were always going on; there were carpenters and masons in
Port Huntlady who came and went as the people came and went. It also
happened that in going away people left many of their possessions behind.
For when they went away it was usually in a hurry, after a sudden tragic-
seeming decision that they were not equal to the spiritual demands their exile
made on them. They went away in a hurry, ashamed to admit to themselves
that they were glad to be going away; and so they left many of their
possessions behind, as a penitential offering to their better selves. Perhaps,
they told themselves, they would come back again when they were stronger.
The truth was, of course, that weakness and not strength was necessary for
life at Port Huntlady.
 The sudden decision of people to leave Port Huntlady always came as the
climax of a gradually formulated question to themselves: what are they doing
in Port Huntlady? Nowhere else could it be prettier than it was there—the
flat, low, sea, as near as if they were in a boat upon it, when it was calm, and
farther away than the sky when it stormed, foaming up immeasurable black
clouds. And the town itself, a bright, self- conscious table of security and
intelligence standing over the sea, ready for anything that might happen. Lady
Port-Huntlady had just such a look in her eyes—unprejudiced as to the
present, curious about the future, wondering what might happen next, yet not
doing anything herself to make things happen. And the abrupt, challenging
mountains behind—watching, watching: how brave they looked, how brave
they made one feel. And the frantic, confused sunsets, so unlike the sedate
Lady Port-Huntlady, who understood everything, and so unlike Cards, who
let things go over his head for the fun of keeping calm no matter what might
happen—the somehow dishonourable sunsets, lying postcards from lying
heavens of prophecy. How beautiful! And the twilight before the honest moon
came up—full of wicked temptations to do things of no importance whatever;
when, indeed, they merely sat on verandas wholesomely alike, with green
sun-flaps fluttering and cool cane rockers balancing a trifle in every direction
—and laughed, and thought, "What could be prettier than Port Huntlady?" and
tried hard not to ask themselves the question: what were they doing in Port
Huntlady?
Lady Port-Huntlady's houses were not very different architecturally from
all the other houses in Port Huntlady, and the furniture and fittings were
neither conspicuously better nor worse. And yet they were, or gave the
impression of being, more desirable houses. People felt in them some homely
assurance of occupancy: they were not merely empty houses, which one
rented and tried to fill—one did not feel alone in them. It was as if they were
already occupied, and, in some not immediately oppressive way, by Lady
Port-Huntlady herself. She never visited them—Cards always arranged
everything for her; it was merely the insinuating pervasiveness of Lady Port-
Huntlady. Everything even faintly associated with Lady Port-Huntlady was
charged with her especial fragrance, an unanalysable impression of
perfection that easily became, so to speak, one's other self. For a little while
the people who lived in Lady Port- Huntlady's houses were Lady Port-
Huntlady. They were quite perfect—and, like her, falsely perfect; but the
falseness did not matter while the perfection lasted. With Lady Port-
Huntlady, the perfection was permanent; and the falseness lay only in the fact
that she did not really exist. And with them the falseness only manifested
itself when they began to dislike Lady Port-Huntlady, as someone whom they
could not equal in falseness—in perfection: when they began to get tired.
And at this point they usually quarrelled with her in some matter in which she
was, of course, always right, and were obliged to go away, feeling their
disappointment with themselves as anger with her. Lady Port-Huntlady's
tenants went away from Port Huntlady sooner than the tenants of other
houses. And in going they left even more possessions behind than other
temporarily permanent residents. Their association with Lady Port-Huntlady
made them feel more permanent than the rest and inspired in them more
extravagant provisions for permanence; and their departures, besides, always
had the quality of secret escapes from Lady Port-Huntlady, with all the
accompanying improvidences that characterize secret escapes.
It has been explained that the people who came to Port Huntlady were
distinguished from people in general by a mental eccentricity that may be
described as an honourable compunction about—well, about how much they
actually understood themselves, other people, things, anything. Lady Port-
Huntlady understood everything; she was not, therefore, in her life at Port
Huntlady, motivated by any compunction. Her understanding was perfect. She
was perfect. And she was at the same time thoroughly insincere. For she
never made a false step. It was impossible to find her out in anything. She
was always right. She kept up the pretense of a reigning world of perfection
all the time; which meant that she must be thoroughly insincere—where was
there such a world? Was there such a world in Port Huntlady? And if there
was, did it not mean that Port Huntlady was itself false—did it really exist as
a place as other places existed? And Lady Port-Huntlady herself, considered
as a human being? How to describe her as a physical presence: looking like
a permanent invalid who had evaded the mortal toll of illness by dying
inwardly, remaining outwardly alive—not large, not small, not young, not
old, not beautiful, not ugly, not particularly anything, and yet so decidedly
there? Never seeming to say anything—and yet, after one had left her
presence, it seemed that she had said a great deal, at least that one had
understood a great many things that one did not really understand. As if
something poignantly final were happening, or had just happened, or was
about to happen, that one could not fail to understand—like the end of the
world? Wasn't that all illusion, and wasn't she responsible for the illusion?
Then Cards. He was fat, spasmodically energetic, always full of jokes. He
seemed human enough. His little green eyes shone in a friendly way when
one spoke to him about anything, as if to say, "Ah, there's more in it than
comes to the surface, but we won't say anything about that" And yet this was
uncomfortable too; it made one feel that one was cutting close to the edge of
mysteries. And Lady Port-Huntlady made one feel that one was inside the
mysteries. And neither was true of one. One was merely extremely interested
in something, without knowing exactly what it was. With Cards and Lady
Port- Huntlady one had to pretend that one knew what it was, for one's own
ease—Cards was so secretive about it, she so open. That was what got on
one's nerves and broke down one's good humour—yes, even one's honour.
And one went away in a fit of frankness with oneself, a sort of fit of irritation
with one's honour. And one left many of one's possessions behind. And
presumably they all went to Cards; for when people took over the houses
they did not find in them the kind of things that they could take for their own
—to leave behind, in their turn, with other things.
In Port Huntlady people rose out of the world to an upper ether of truth and
clarity that—what was the use of pretending—could not possibly exist. The
world was the world, and the things that happened in that world were the
realities. And there was no outside to that world, nowhere where the
illumination—the understanding—was better. If there was an outside, it was,
on the contrary, darker there. In the end Port Huntlady always clapped that
dark heavily round them. And they hurried away into the light again.
2
On Foolish Island there was only one building, the boat-house, and this was
too large for its purpose. It was made of reinforced concrete, whitewashed
and then stippled with colour, like all the houses of Port Huntlady; except that
several colours had been used in the stippling, which gave the effect, because
of the careless spread of the boathouse, of yards of cotton print suitable for
children's frocks but not made up into anything in particular. So the houses of
Port Huntlady gave the effect of ready-made shirts, blouses, aprons or
holiday suits for grownup people, to be had in colours to suit every taste and
in all reasonable sizes. And the stuff, like the stuff of the boat-house, of the
best—fast colour, everlasting, too good, in fact. The front of the boat-house
followed the curve of the shore of Foolish Island; the back, facing the interior
of the island, was windowless, as if to say, "That looks out only on Foolish
Island." The front of the boat-house looked towards Port Huntlady, but with a
smile of insolent disinterest, as if to say, "There's nothing to see, it's all
tiresome fancy, but look if you must." When people went to Foolish Island
with lunches, they would make themselves cosy in the lounge which ran the
length of the curve, opening out folding-chairs and folding- tables near a
window; and, perspiring a little from the climb up the boat-house steps and
the violence of trying to make themselves cosy in a room that was really too
large to be cosy in, would dutifully give themselves up to the uncertain
demands of the scenery.
From Foolish Island Port Huntlady looked like the top of the world.
Looking up towards it, people felt that, in theory, they were extremely
moved. Ah, the lady-like beauty of Port Huntlady—-looking up from Foolish
Island: the sea rolling towards it in slow, punctilious terraces, the cliff rising
under the town like a proud heart lifting up a proud head. No, Port Huntlady
did not, after all, appeal, although one knew that nothing could be prettier.
This was why one respected it and loved it, so to speak, merely platonically.
No, there was something repellent about Port Huntlady—as there is
something repellent about a woman whose disinclination for sex makes her
sexually attractive. From Foolish Island Port Huntlady rose forbiddingly and
temptingly above the fictitious emotions it inspired. From Foolish Island one
saw Port Huntlady as a place that one had no right to be in because one was
not good enough; and yet that one could not resist living in, at least for a time,
exactly because one was not good enough.
Under the lounge, between the cement supports, there were roomy boat-
stalls and dressing-rooms. The boat-stalls were empty, the dressing-rooms
rarely used. It was here that the cats of the island lived—a ginger race, large,
ugly, stupid, affectionate. They did not seem to mind living alone on the
island, or to grow wild or unfriendly. When visitors came they were glad to
see them. But it never occurred to visitors to take them away for pets, nor
would they have been happy in Port Huntlady: Foolish Island was their
home. They lived on the remains of the visitors' lunches—perhaps on little
else. And they slept and bore their families in civilized privacy and comfort
in the lunch-hampers that people were always leaving behind and that
somehow found their way to the roomy boat-stalls and dressing-rooms. We
all know how lunch-hampers, like honeymoon dressing-cases with silk
linings and gold or silver fittings, grow cumbersome and antiquated on their
first trip, break a strap or a handle, spill the tightest flask and, regardless of
their cost or the sentiment attached to them, are recklessly presented to
strangers.
This observation is irrelevant to our story, except that it presents the ginger
cats of Foolish Island in the light of strangers and, in so doing, emphasizes
the character of the island itself—its clockishness, let me say. We all know
how, on our travels, a sudden sense of the strangeness of strangers makes
something in us snap, as if we had just seen a clock for the first time for
months: we come back to the present from a lazy delusion of recumbence
upon the past. Well, at Foolish Island Port Huntlady people came back to the
present from a lazy delusion of recumbence upon the future. Port Huntlady
was only a train-journey, only a dream that they dreamed in the world proper.
And Foolish Island was a point in the dream where they saw a clock, and got
out, and took the train back again, turning the dream round as children
manipulate their toy-trains by the laws of impulse rather than of machinery.
And so the cats under the boat-house at Foolish Island must be interesting to
us on account of the effect that they had on the visitors. The cats were not
only strangers but the cats of strangers. And who were the strangers whose
cats these were? The strangers were the people themselves. We all know the
power of cats to make us feel ill at ease, or at least ill at ease in houses
whose household gods they are and whose domestic graces they articulate by
making them strange to strangers. But we shall leave the cats of Foolish
Island for the present and perhaps not speak of them again, as we shall soon
be leaving Foolish Island, and, finally, Port Huntlady, and perhaps not be
speaking of either again.
Above the lounge was another floor. No one was ever seen to go up to it
except Cards. Lady Port-Huntlady also went up to it, but only on night visits
to Foolish Island. People knew that about once a month she and Cards went
to Foolish Island alone, returning sometime before dawn, but they did not
know that her business with Cards had anything to do with the storeroom
above the lounge; they merely knew that it had something to do with Foolish
Island. Exactly what this business was has no important bearing on our story.
We must treat of it briefly, as we have treated of the cats briefly, in order not
to return to the matter again, if possible. Such matters do not carry the story
along; on the contrary, they retard the story. They represent rather the weight
of the story in words, or the time that the material of the story took to shape
itself into a single pathetic impression by which it may be related to other
stories, forming with them such a baggage of half-truths as we may carry
about with us like an intimate and therefore virtuous vice—something to think
about with a perverse possessiveness that cannot, however, lead to much
outward confusion, being in its very privacy so unambitious. You know how
it is with some half-essential patent article you buy, perhaps a fountain-pen,
or a bottle of ink, or a dictionary: you speak of 'my' dictionary, and so on, and
it is all rather shadowy. Exactly what the business between Cards and Lady
Port-Huntlady was, then, is a matter standing in the way of your ultimate
enjoyment of this story as a thing of your own. It is—how shall we say—the
pious tediousness of the author, who, in telling a story, must always observe
the fiction that to tell a story is to persuade people of something entirely true,
or publicly actual; this side of a story is called its verisimilitude.
 It is, of course, obvious that to tell a story is to persuade people of
something almost false. We are all aware that there is no such place as Port
Huntlady. It may well be that there is a place to which Port Huntlady stands
as a lie stands to the truth. In fact, this is not far from being the case. And this
is why some matters secondary to the story must be brought in, such as the
business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady, to make the story seem true
as well as, quite frankly, a story. For this true-seeming is the power of the
story to keep your interest until you have abandoned, quite frankly, those
rational standards of interest with which we all prop up our chins when our
thoughts scurry between brain and heart and we can do no better than be
proud. It is the moral pretence of the story created by our joint vanity in being
conscientious, orderly and truthful creatures—before we give ourselves up to
its gentle idiocy, hypnotized by our physical susceptibility to less exacting
notions of what is worthy of our interest. Ah, the indulgent muse of stories,
Lady Nonsense, who knows how to hide the severities behind her pale,
expressionless, almost silly face and let time become a bland truce between
laughing and crying.
And Lady Port-Huntlady? Who can prove her to be other than Lady
Nonsense? Who can prove that Lady Nonsense does not understand
everything? Who can prove that Lady Nonsense is not Lady Understanding,
and that Lady Understanding is not Lady Nonsense turning up in this
particular story as Lady Port-Huntlady, resolved to let other people tire of
equivocation before she does? But how to describe the business between
Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady in as short a sentence as the charm of the story
will permit? For we must not do violence to the charm of the story—that is,
to its hospitality (how it makes one sit down and forget the pressure of the
severities)—by reminding ourselves too brutally at any point of the nature of
this transaction, which is, after all, a cold exchange between your desire, on
the one hand, to pay your respects to the really important things without
getting actually involved, so to speak, in their family life, and, on the other
hand, my desire (or perhaps we should say the desire of Lady Nonsense, or
of Lady Understanding, or perhaps we had better say, of Lady Port-Huntlady)
to make somewhat light of the really important things before visitors, or at
any rate, not to urge anyone to stay longer than he wishes.
That is, by exercising the limited courtesies possible between us we create
between us the charm of the story; we have a tepid fascination for each other
that we are each anxious to let run its course without lasting inconvenience
on either side. And so we keep the story between us as a substitute for any
more profound experience of each other, an emotion-screen in whose making
we both co-operate. Besides being a story—something in large part unreal—
it is, as well, something in place of reality. Thus you keep your gracefulness
and I keep mine: we do not distort our faces with the futile passions of futile
adventure. I give you the false excitement you want, without obliging you to
inquire exhaustively into the problem of which the story is only a
philosophical dilution. And you give me—and what do you give me? Shall
we agree that you give me—ah, what is it that I want most? Most of all I want
peace, to be left alone, unless there is something to be gained, by you, in
breaking my peace, and by me in having it broken. I do not mind giving you a
cup of tea, if that is all you want. But I do not like being forced into a
conversation about the really important things when all you want is a cup of
tea. This is insincerity, if you will, since I am only interested in the really
important things: it is insincere of me to give you a cup of tea at all. But that
is my way of understanding everything, even a cup of tea. My understanding
everything is my way of being alone and yet not locking myself up in my
room all day.
Every afternoon at five o'clock I am to be found in my conversation-room,
giving tea to people who come to talk about the really important things, and
then change their minds so soon as ever they have their cup of tea in their
laps. This delicacy of mine, which gives you the impression of my pretending
to be a perfect creature, and which gradually gets on your nerves, is, I agree,
not perfection at all but merely a selfish understanding of everything. My real
perfection is, I hope, not so obvious to you as the perfection of my manners.
Wherein that lies is my secret. I may tell you that it lies in my power to treat
you as if you were really interested in the really important things, when it is
quite clear to me that you are not, and to keep the really important things to
myself all the time—but just that, and no more. I cannot tell you, in fact, what
I am really like.
But I can tell you a story. And the matter of the business between Cards and
Lady Port-Huntlady is an illustration of my awareness that a story must be
something more than a supercilious concession to your boredom with the
really important things. You are bored with them but sorry that you are bored.
I must tell about this business in a way that shows that I appreciate the fact
that, though you have lost interest in the really important things, you once had
an interest in them. And out of respect for your lost interest I must make my
description of this business as real as possible. I must believe in it as if it
were itself one of the really important things. I must make it stand for all the
really important things whose omission from this story makes it a story. The
business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady is a symbol of our
agreement in the existence of really important things. Without such a symbol
in our story we should, as a point of honour, refuse to have anything to do
with it.
The business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady which had something
to do with Foolish Island, and, further, with the store-room of the boat-house
(though nobody knew this much about it), was the sorting, classification,
arrangement and evaluation of the many possessions which people left
behind when they went away from Port Huntlady, and which Cards disposed
of in Port Huntlady in an informal way, working on Lady Port-Huntlady's
calculation of the needs of the various residents according to their degree of
temporary permanence.
I had hoped that this sentence would be a short sentence; and yet, long as it
is, it may not, I fear, impress you as a symbol for the really important things.
But since we are in a hurry to be getting along (shall we admit), does not the
business between Cards and Lady Port-Huntlady serve its purpose very well,
after all? For in leaving it behind we are leaving behind all our patience with
narrative accuracy and the slow difficult understanding of hidden activities
and meanings—in fact, that strained pretence of indifference to time that
constituted the charm of Lady Port-Huntlady's conversation-room. We are
leaving behind the charm of our story. We have finished with compliments,
and understanding, and moral niceties. Here follows the shameless gist of the
story—something to loosen the tension of a not really frank state of affairs,
the not really frank state of affairs in Port Huntlady, any not really frank state
of affairs.

3
Dan the Dog came to the town of Port Huntlady with two friends, Baby and
Slick. The three friends rented a house of Lady Port-Huntlady's, and at five
o'clock on the day after their arrival they were brought into her conversation-
room by Cards. Lady Port-Huntlady's tea-drinkers did not consist merely of
her tenants, but she gave her tenants a preferential intimacy: they sat in the
conversation-room with her rather as associate hosts than as guests. Dan,
Baby and Slick were immediately induced into these ceremonial manœuvres.
They soon understood that they must sit rather nearer Lady Port-Huntlady
than the others, or, if they could not sit near, that they must sit in lesser
corners of the room in the capacity of social secretaries. Besides helping
with the tea-cups, they must talk with the others as Lady Port-Huntlady talked
—in a sympathetic way but without yielding points. This technique created
those significant lulls in the conversation that made five o'clock at Lady Port-
Huntlady's seem to clarify the question-mark with which the people who
came to Port Huntlady felt their souls branded.
The three friends had taken Lady Port-Huntlady's prettiest house, a smallish
one, stippled in a sophisticated pink, with a veranda running along both sides
as well as in front—due perhaps to a feeling in some preceding tenant that
the house looked too small for permanent residence: with a veranda running
around it, it seemed a chosen gem, not merely a house that one had rented
cheap because, for all its prettiness, it could not be called more than a
cottage. The three friends were students; they had a knack of making a home
out of a bedroom. Each made himself a home apart from the others in his
bedroom; and as this left the rest of the house practically unoccupied, it
seemed to them that they were living in quite a large house.
They took their meals in a pension at the left of their house. The proprietor
did not call it a pension. He would say, "Why not come along and take your
meals with me? I am a lonely man, we are all lonely folk here. We can share
the expenses." Nevertheless, people called it a pension. They shared the
expenses in the sense that every week they had to pay something different; but
they were expected to pay at the end of every week just as if they were at a
pension, and so naturally they called it a pension. The man was known as
Tomatoes. He was tall, and rather fat, and had a small blond head and a large
bright-complexioned face. He was not a young man, but the facile serenity of
his face prevented people from taking him seriously; they told him their
histories with as little reserve and as little compulsion to good sense as they
would employ in a diary. He had been a clergyman, but he had resigned his
living because he loved hearing people talk about themselves, and because,
as a clergyman, he had had to think always, "Now ought I, as a clergyman, to
be listening to this?" He talked in order to make people say things that he
could listen to. If people talked a lot, he thought "How stimulating," and he,
on the other hand, thought himself stimulating if he succeeded in making them
talk. He was only interested, however, in the conversation of men. His
manners with women were irreproachable, and, as he said, he had a respect
for them above his respect for men. But women were not interesting to him
because they were not sinners. It was not natural in women to sin, but it was
natural in men to sin, and this made them interesting. Sinning was wrong, but
the exaltation of knowing that one had sinned and the broad-minded tolerant
conversation of ex-sinners were worth the sinning. Sinning, he was fond of
saying, made honourable scars on the soul. Heaven was the knowledge of
one's own wickedness.
 It has been necessary to tell about Tomatoes, even at the risk of seeming to
digress from the three friends' first five-o'clock at Lady Port-Huntlady's. For
Tomatoes was present at this five- o'clock, and already on terms of manly
confidence with them, they having taken their first meal with him the previous
evening. There were also present the right-hand neighbours of the three young
men. These were two women who had between them adopted the baby of an
actress—a sister of one of them. The younger, of youthful middle age, plump
and impulsive, was Diana. The older—tall, big-boned, majestic and
austerely kind—was Miss Bookworth. It was Miss Bookworth's sister,
strangely enough, who was the actress. They had originally come away to
Port Huntlady because they were rather embarrassed at owning the baby,
although they were both earnestly dedicated to the idea of owning it. They
were women, one felt, who were not happy in being women; who resented
the finger of curiosity which life pointed at women. The baby expressed their
resignation to the necessity of biding their time. Their settling down in Port
Huntlady expressed their impatience with themselves. They lived there in the
fatalistic hope of being swallowed up in some sudden catastrophe—for was
it not a place that seemed to lean over the horrible edge of time into the
future? Without being fond of the baby, they were loyal to it: it stood between
them and the catastrophe with which they teased their weariness of self-
conscious existence.
Many people in Port Huntlady had wondered about Miss Bookworth and
Tomatoes. Miss Bookworth and Tomatoes had often wondered about each
other. When they were together they seemed like two people who had been
married for a very long time: they had just such an inactive contempt for each
other's qualities. Had they been married, she would have bitterly enjoyed
seeing him throw himself into the confidence of other people, to get
repeatedly thrown out. And he would have bitterly enjoyed seeing her grow
older and feebler, for all her self-discipline against the sentimental follies of
old age. For Tomatoes, youth meant that 'feeling young' of which only the old
are capable; it did not matter to him that people thought him soft-minded. He
was, indeed, deliberately soft-minded, on the principle that the body thrives
on the frailties of the mind—if one knows what one is about. His attitude to
Diana was equally based on his notions of youth and old age. Miss
Bookworth was the same age as himself: she was old. Diana was a little
younger: she was not young enough. But he flirted with her as any man of
border-line years flirts with women just a little too old to be fallen in love
with—by way of inducing in himself the proper spirit of playfulness in which
to approach women still young enough to be fallen in love with; thus most
men maintain to the end a life of sexual gallantry with their wives, their
interest being increasingly one of technique as they increasingly feel the
temptation to start all over again with someone else. Diana did not flirt with
Tomatoes. But she was a disappointed and nevertheless lively woman and so
inclined to be reckless in her remarks, her gestures and her actions. Many
people misunderstood her, thinking her a bold woman— Tomatoes among
these. She let him flirt with her because she liked the exercise, and there was
very little exercise of this primitive sort available at Port Huntlady; and it
pleased him, for his part, to feel that he had a stimulating effect on her. Such
more or less were Tomatoes's relations with Diana and Miss Bookworth at
the period when Dan, Baby and Slick came to their first five-o'clock at Lady
Port-Huntlady's.
These six were all tenants of Lady Port-Huntlady's. There were also
present several people who were not tenants of Lady Port-Huntlady's:
Mabick, a retired publisher, Barney Flagg, a crippled ex-acrobat, and Laura
Manilla, a temperamental modiste who was thinking of opening a shop in
Port Huntlady where she could practise her profession as she had always
dreamed of practising it—as an art. Dan was given a chair at Lady Port-
Huntlady's side, as if it had been reserved for him. It was a low chair, and
Dan was a tall young man with imperfect muscular control; he stabilized
himself on it by twisting his legs whimsically round one of the legs of the
sofa on which Lady Port-Huntlady always sat alone (though there was room
on it for two). This was how he got to be called 'Dan the Dog'. Dan had been
a medical student, but had abandoned his studies because being a doctor
involved touching the naked bodies of living people, which he thought
menial: there could be a quality of scholarship in touching the naked bodies
of dead people, but the naked bodies of living people were the province of
only mothers, midwives, nurses, masseurs and valets.
"So you were once going to be a doctor?" said Lady Port- Huntlady in the
tone that always made people feel that their past was well behind them.
"Here we are never ill," she continued. "Because we don't, you see, try to be
healthy. But what special line?" Baby, who was discussing men's clothes
with Cards, interrupted boyishly, "Ladies!" Cards laughed, and Lady Port-
Huntlady sent a smile towards him without noticing Baby; and thus Baby's
rôle among them was fixed—a lightheaded fellow whom everyone must
tolerate because he amused Cards. Dan paid no attention to Baby's
interruption and answered haughtily, "Gynecology." "Oh," said Lady Port-
Huntlady, as if this were quite a different explanation. And her "Oh"
established a mutuality of innuendo between them; Dan reacted to it as a stray
dog reacts to the first advances of someone who has decided to adopt him—
as if it were he who had decided to adopt Lady Port-Huntlady. Of course, she
meant him to react in this way. Lady Port-Huntlady was a great believer in
mutuality. In the beginning, in a new relation, she generally had to create the
feeling of mutuality all by herself. But as the relation progressed, it came to
be the other way round.
Slick had been an assistant at a men's draper's in the university town in
which Dan and Baby had lived as students. From Dan and Baby he had
learned how to behave in an upper-class way, though they themselves did not
behave, on the whole, in an upper-class way: being natively upper-class
young men, they could afford to forget their inherited securities and resort to
them only in emergencies. Slick had grown to be quite fond of them, as a
butler grows to be fond of a master whom he has surpassed in aristocratic
behaviour by carefully noting points on which he tends to be careless. Among
other things, they were careless about their clothes. He liked to see them
nicely dressed—if only to justify his own fondness for being nicely dressed.
He was always giving them presents of clothes—in excellent taste—from
surplus stock that he got cheap from the shop. When Dan and Baby left the
university they had taken Slick along with them. Baby had inherited a lot of
money from an ancestor who had left his fortune to the first descendant of the
fourth generation to come of age. The ancestor had made his money out of
houses of prostitution in India; he had hoped that by the time the fourth
generation came of age the source of his wealth would have been forgotten.
Baby, however, did not forget its source. He spent it as a child, grinning with
a sophisticated sense of guilt, spends money that a good- natured drunkard
has offered him, and that he has not refused. And as a child in such
circumstances might choose the largest, pinkest, most abstractly beautiful
sweet in the shop (perhaps not to eat at all, only to keep in his pocket), so
Baby chose Port Huntlady to spend his money in. He felt here, that is, that he
was spending it on Port Huntlady itself, rather than on Dan or Slick—
although it was mostly through them that he spent it. They helped him to
choose the large, pink, abstractly beautiful sweet; but it was he who had it in
his pocket.
Baby made a friend of Dan because he was, like a too-big dog, proud,
resourceless, aggrieved, absurd. When people were absurd Baby felt that
there was something 'pure' about them. Dan lived on Baby's money. Slick
lived on Baby's money. Baby liked Slick because no matter how much of his
money Slick spent on himself, to be a gentleman, he only became increasingly
ambitious to be something more than a gentleman: he was always something
undefinably below, and undefinably above, a gentleman. It was absurd, of
course, to try to be both a gentleman and successful. But nothing could kill
Slick's confidence in energy; and this made him 'pure' in Baby's eyes. It will
save us some tiresomely picturesque skirting round the facts to know now
that a few weeks after this particular five- o'clock, and as a consequence of
an unspoken agreement there and then arrived at, Slick and Diana married
each other. Diana was fifteen years older than Slick, but she married him for
his vulgarity rather than for his youth. Slick had an ungentlemanly talent for
making dull days into bright days. If a day was dull, he had to brighten it up.
A gentleman does not do this. Slick couldn't make a dull day very bright, but
Diana didn't like things very bright. She liked exercise: to feel that things
were moving along—not necessarily to a happy end. Slick himself had no
ambitions of happiness; happiness is, after all, an extremely delicate notion.
Baby settled a definite income on Slick at his marriage. This was the only
way to keep Slick on his books without making Diana feel that he was
disputing her rights in him. He knew that the more triumphant she felt about
having got Slick away from him, the sooner she would begin to be irritated
by her triumph. For example, Diana was the sort of person who never looked
right in her clothes, no matter how well they fitted her or how pretty they
were—they always looked as if they were slipping off. But if a new dress
did, by chance, fit her really well, she would get irritated with it, pull it this
way and that each time she put it on, and suddenly stop wearing it altogether.
So one day she would throw off Slick, and exactly because he was such a
good fit. Baby was perhaps the only gentleman in Port Huntlady: a gentleman
believes in his possessions even if he seems to lose them. The person he
most resembled in Port Huntlady, indeed, was Lady Port-Huntlady herself.
For him, too, his friends were unreal parts of himself. Not only Dan and
Slick, but all the other people in Port Huntlady, except Lady Port-Huntlady,
were unreal parts of himself. He felt that he was somehow spending his
money on all of them; and they were all more or less absurd—'pure'. As for
Lady Port-Huntlady, he refused to recognize her existence, even as a part of
himself; she was what he called 'weather'.
Meanwhile Diana was not unhappy; she looked on her life with Slick as a
private honeymoon innocently in advance of the destined universal
catastrophe. Slick, too, was pleased. Although Diana was fifteen years older
than himself, she seemed young to him. He had always promised himself a
wife who should be both young and serious; and Diana seemed just that. She
would get excited about any improvement that he suggested for their house;
then she would gracefully leave him alone to carry it out himself. And this
spurred him on. He was always hurrying from one improvement to the next.
Theirs was the most improved house in Port Huntlady. It was one of Lady
Port-Huntlady's houses, and so every time Slick thought of a new
improvement he had to get Lady Port-Huntlady's permission to carry it out.
Of course she never made any objections, but Diana, who did not like being
watched, felt that Lady Port-Huntlady was watching them, as if in their
enthusiasm to have a really nice home they were being a little excessive even
for Port Huntlady. Why, in fact, were they living in Port Huntlady? Why
shouldn't they have a really nice home somewhere else? Why (Diana began
asking herself) should she be living in Port Huntlady? Why should she want
to have a really nice home anywhere?
To the question "Why am I living in Port Huntlady?" Slick would have
answered, "It gives me practical ideas." In other places one's ideas always
seemed unpractical because there were so many things that stood in the way
of one's carrying them out. In Port Huntlady there were no obstacles, and so
the ideas one had seemed practical; it seemed to give one ideas, unlike other
places, which only gave opposition. What is an idea? It is an enlargement of
oneself. In Port Huntlady one seemed larger. Was this because, as a place, it
was not very substantial: because it used people to fill it out, puffed them up?
Slick didn't notice. He noticed only how he felt, and in Port Huntlady he felt
successful. Slick's feeling of success little by little began getting on Diana's
nerves. It made her life with him seem humiliatingly public and permanent.
So she began treating him like a dress that fitted her too well and of which
everyone thought, "How well she looks in it!" She began, so to speak, trying
to pull Slick out of place here and there, as she would with such a dress, to
try to make people mind their own business when she wore it. For example,
while she did not disagree about the improvements he went on adding to their
house, she would somehow make him feel, after each new one, that it had not,
really, been worth all the fuss; so that he would start another which might,
perhaps, when it was done, seem worth all the fuss. He was only trying to
make a really nice home for them; certainly this was what she had wanted in
the beginning. If their home no longer satisfied her, he could only say to
himself that he had failed to make it nice enough. He did not understand that
the nicer he made it, the more irritated she got; he could only understand that
he had failed. He could only understand his ideas—whether they were
successful or not. When certain ideas did not turn out successful he looked
round for others.
Diana—that is, the particular ideas associated with her—was not going to
be a success, after all. He could not go back to his previous life with Baby
and Dan; that had been merely the youthful trying-out ground of his
potentialities. He was now, in his own view, a man. To be a man was a
wonderful achievement for a child of the poor, and he felt that he owed it to
his class to make the most out of his achievement: not many children of the
poor became men. And being a man did not only mean to him being a
gentleman—someone whose social value other people took for granted, from
the intrinsic personal value he attached to himself. It meant constant
application. As someone who had once been a child of the poor, he had to
keep up his belief in himself by concrete evidence of his social reality.
Other people might take his value for granted, but he could not. And so he
was always preoccupied with the practical success of whatever activity he
might at the moment be engaged in, rather than with any, shall we say,
spiritual, critical, dramatic or merely economic significance it might have.
And since he had failed with Diana, it was natural that he chose, after Diana,
Laura Manilla as the titular theme of his activities. She was, as Diana had
been, a woman whose history seemed to lie in something that had not yet
happened to her. How true this was of most women—all their history lay
ahead of them. Slick had hoped—with all his heart—to make history for
Diana. He had, in fact; but she had not really enjoyed it. There were some
women who actually hated living. A man ought to be able to make a woman
enjoy living: this was real success—having one's ideas appreciated. Interest
in some man's ideas was what gave a woman an interest in life, though of
course a man's ideas had to be in sympathy with the tastes of the woman he
wanted to please. There could be no doubt that Laura Manilla was looking
for an interest in life in sympathy with her tastes.
It all went back to a conversation that Baby had had with Cards at that first
five-o'clock at Lady Port-Huntlady's. Slick always listened to other people's
conversation. From listening he got ideas. He could not use all of the ideas
that he got in this way, but he never quite forgot them; and sometimes an idea
that seemed fanciful when it first occurred to him came in handy later. Baby's
conversation with Cards had been about clothes. Baby was saying to Cards
that he liked wearing women's clothes—women's jerseys, women's jackets,
women's blouses. The reason was, women's clothes did not make one feel
big and important, as men's clothes did; women's clothes made one—as they
made women—feel little and irresponsible. The way men dressed, they had
no choice but to be either very good or very bad. But with women, the way
they dressed, it was all more or less fun. Baby grinned slyly through his hair
at Lady Port-Huntlady, as if to say that he did not mean the way she dressed
but the way he dressed; Lady Port-Huntlady's clothes were delicate but
solemn fabrications, and it certainly was not all more or less fun with her.
Cards, too, dressed somewhat like a woman, his shirt bloused out at the
waist, a red sash holding up his trousers, and a tartan shawl fastened at the
neck (with a safety-pin) or clinging unfastened to his shoulders in an absurdly
graceful, miraculous way—as women's things do somehow stay on. The
strongest argument in favour of womanish clothes was that women did not
dress by the weather. Stopping to think about the weather made clothes a
bore.
At this point Laura Manilla had clinched the discussion primly. "Why not,"
she said, "just such a shop at Port Huntlady, with no distinction between the
sexes?" This, of course, made everyone think of the distinctions between the
sexes and talk at random again. Tomatoes asked Mabick about poets: were
they not difficult to deal with in a business way—too sensitive? Mabick
answered that he only dealt with poets through their wives, whom poets
seemed to make the scapegoats of their beautiful delusions. The wives of
poets always understood the difficulties. They were not ashamed to take
favours. But Slick kept the conversation about clothes in mind.
By this time Diana had had a baby. "Why did I have a baby?" she now
asked herself. Lady Port-Huntlady seemed responsible for everything. She
provoked people to be untrue to themselves. She seemed to look into people
and see things —one did not know quite what. This made one excited. One
imagined things in oneself. One did things that one did not mean to. Diana
had never meant to have a baby. So one day, finding herself looking with
horror at the baby, she suddenly ran away—perhaps to prevent herself from
killing it. Miss Bookworth would take care of it. If she had killed it, perhaps
someone would have killed her—perhaps Slick. She ran away from her baby,
Slick, Lady Port-Huntlady. Or perhaps she would have killed Slick—or Lady
Port-Huntlady. Or perhaps Slick would have killed her because of Laura
Manilla. Or perhaps Lady Port-Huntlady would have killed her—in some
clever, secret way. Diana ran away from the sudden catastrophe that had once
been the gloomy darling of her thoughts, and no one in Port Huntlady ever
heard of her again.
Slick and Laura Manilla set up a shop called 'The Smiling Mirror'. The
theory was that in looking at themselves in a mirror people should smile. The
clothes were rather like fancy- dress costumes, and, as far as possible, for
men and women indifferently. The customer was dressed out in a mirrorless
compartment, then taken into the mirror salon and asked to look at himself
and smile. If he smiled it was assumed that the clothes suited him and that the
sale was accomplished. Slick and Laura Manilla lived very neatly together in
two rooms behind the shop. Slick had taught himself to draw a little, to help
Laura with new designs for clothes. He invented a motto: "Every garment
must be a joke". 'Joke' was synonymous with 'work of art', as people with
modern views about painting say that a picture is 'amusing' when they mean it
is a good picture. Indeed, he now thought of himself as an artist. Every time
he had a new idea Laura would say, "Slick, you're an artist." And an artist
was automatically a gentleman. It wasn't so certain if one was a writer.
Anyway, he couldn't write. But he did have ideas, and Laura was delighted
with him. She too was an artist, but she needed a man to keep up her interest.
It was he who managed the sewing-women and ordered the stuffs. But, of
course, Laura was the inspiration. She had a wonderful tired smile that made
people feel that they owed it to her to be gay. She was very good at selling
things. People found it so difficult to make a point of their own tastes while
she was smiling at them. One night a week they gave a party in their shop for
the people who had bought clothes from them: the guests were supposed to
wear the clothes they had bought and prove to one another how much gayer
they felt in them. Slick was always the gayest, although, strangely enough, he
didn't wear the kind of clothes they sold. He was a producer, not an actor.
Besides, he looked better in conventional clothes, he knew; conventional
clothes were the safest if one wasn't born a gentleman. Laura Manilla, too,
dressed in a rather negative style. She was very tall and embarrassingly thin;
she had the sort of body one thinks of as a tree—something, merely, that
stands up and looks on. It would have been very bad for business if she had,
by wearing experimental clothes, called attention to the pathetic
defencelessness of bodies against the inappropriate things people do with
them.
As for Baby—after having innocently started this idea about clothes, he
applied himself to an innocent conversation with Barney Flagg about
knocking people on the head. When Barney had fallen—in an acrobatic stunt
—he had injured his spine, with the result that his legs, from the knees down,
became limp and useless. He now walked by means of two sticks with which
he swung himself from step to step. Baby had once broken a leg and knew
about sticks. "They make you think about knocking people on the head. You
get quite free with them." The idea of Barney's knocking someone on the head
with one of his sticks amused Cards, and Lady Port-Huntlady smiled at
Cards. Barney looked at his sticks and smiled. And let us here get over an
incident that must in any case occur later on in the story by telling how
Barney did eventually knock someone on the head with one of his sticks; he
did, in fact, kill Tomatoes at dinner one evening during a discussion on the
spiritual value of misfortune.
"Do you not," Tomatoes asked Barney, "feel a stronger man since Fate
made a cripple of you?" "You bet I do," Barney answered hilariously, "I feel
fine." And then Barney, to show how fine he felt, shook one of his sticks in
the air. Everyone except Tomatoes laughed uncomfortably—it is not pleasant
to laugh with a cripple about his deformity. Tomatoes, however, really
believed that Barney's good humour was genuine. As Barney swung his stick
towards him he ducked his head playfully. It crashed hard into his plate as
Barney struck it. For a moment everyone was afraid to admit to himself that
something serious had happened. To Tomatoes fun was something sacred.
"Joyous secret of saints and sinners," he would say. Perhaps this was fun. But
Tomatoes was dead.
The police in Port Huntlady were temporarily permanent residents like all
the rest. No one knew who appointed them, or exactly what their powers
were. They seemed to be merely residents who had the courage to despise
Port Huntlady and everyone who came to it, yet not quite the courage to go
away. One does not think of policemen, indeed, as loving the places whose
peace they so devoutly maintain. Port Huntlady policemen translated the Port
Huntlady point of view about events into a law. The view was that nothing
could happen in Port Huntlady on any given day, however strongly one might
feel that some day something important was bound to happen. The law was
that in any given day nothing must happen. And so the Port Huntlady police
refused to regard Tomatoes's death as a public event; it was his own affair.
No one in Port Huntlady was interested in how the others got the money on
which they lived there, and equally death was not a subject for curiosity.
Barney was held to be no more involved in Tomatoes's death than he would
have been in his financial troubles if he had by chance handed Tomatoes a
letter threatening him with legal prosecution for dishonest debt.
As a matter of fact, just such a letter arrived the next day for Tomatoes, and
it might easily have happened, if he had still been alive, that Barney would
have handed it to him at lunch. For the postman always called a little before
lunch, and it was usually Barney, sitting on the veranda (having come very
early to avoid being excused, as a cripple, for coming late), who took the
letters; he liked keeping them in his pocket and bringing them out at lunch and
watching the faces people made as they read them. Perhaps Barney was
somewhat curious about what was in the letters. At any rate, it pleased him to
see people screw up their faces over their letters: people always screw up
their faces as if in pain over letters—in pain, or as if in pain. Barney suffered
a good deal of pain from his spine, although he never talked about it. He
might have talked about it if other people had not been so secretive about
their private discomforts. But most people pretended that they had nothing the
matter with them. Women pretended less than men; but women had so much
the matter with them—they were always suffering. Even if they had
practically nothing the matter with them, they had, at least, a slight headache.
Women were all sympathy—either with themselves or with men. Barney was
not a womanish man, but he was womanish compared with other men. It was
not altogether from cruelty that he took pleasure in seeing people screw up
their faces in pain over their letters— or as if in pain. He was ready to be
sincerely attentive to the emotions of other people, if they showed them; it
irritated him that they made themselves so private. Tomatoes, particularly,
had irritated him, because, although he tried to know all about other people,
he never told anything about himself. He had made it seem that he was only
interested in their souls. Barney had a prejudice against clergymen,
especially ex-clergymen. People like that, he said, were inquisitive, not
sympathetic, and they were inquisitive because they were jealous. They were
jealous of people's souls because they had none themselves: they liked to
prove to themselves that other people were as soulless as they were.
Such fine analysis of Barney's attitude to Tomatoes, to other people, to life
in general and to himself in particular, may not seem to have much
importance for our story. But, indeed, is our story very important? Is any
story very important? I assure you that no story is of much importance; and I
think you will agree with me. Are we not all agreed that only a few things are
really important? And are we not further agreed that it is almost impossible
to agree what these few things are? Here we are telling ourselves a story
about a place where people fancied themselves to be dealing with these few
really important things, without knowing ourselves exactly what they are.
And so is it not natural that, in self-punishment, we should give weight as
well to insignificant factors in the story? Since we do not know, at least not
with absolute certainty, what the significant factors are? Have we the right
yet to choose between what is significant and what is not? Are we, indeed,
giving weight? I trust not. Equally I trust that we are covering the ground
efficiently. We have now made it clear that Tomatoes was killed by Barney,
and that Barney was held to have no more to do with Tomatoes's death than
he might with some other private affair of Tomatoes's about which some
unpleasant letter had arrived, to be handed to him, quite accidentally, by
Barney. We have also indicated that if such a letter had arrived it would
probably have been handed to him by Barney, And also that this would
probably have been the case, had Tomatoes lived, since the very next day
after his death a letter arrived in which he was threatened with prosecution
for dishonest debt.
Tomatoes, it seemed, had been given quite a lot of money by an elderly
lady, a Miss Man, to invest in a pension in Port Huntlady which she was to
take over from him when he had got it in running order, retaining him as
manager. Tomatoes had written to her that conditions were unfavourable in
Port Huntlady for a new pension, but had failed to return the money. Upon
being notified of Tomatoes's death by Barney, Miss Man came to Port
Huntlady and claimed the pension for hers. She took an immediate fancy to
Barney as having been the instrument of Tomatoes's death. Though elderly,
she had a salacious tongue, and talked freely with Barney about Tomatoes.
Tomatoes's real name was Mr. Clingby. He had, as a clergyman, interested
himself in houses of prostitution and been what he called, in his poetical
way, a lover of low life. He had taken many girls away from such houses
and, at the expense of the Salvation of the Flesh Society, of which Miss Man
was Mother-Leader, had established them in little homes which he had
practically made his own. Miss Man said that she had never trusted him; but
she had admired his cleverness in getting the girls' confidence, which was the
first step in all social work. She had given him money to invest in a pension
in Port Huntlady because she had heard Port Huntlady well spoken of by
many, as it were, serious people. Social work made one spiritually static,
and she was anxious to devote her mind to the really important things in life;
and she knew that she could rely on Tomatoes's want of idealism in business
matters. It had not occurred to her that his want of idealism would make him
so foolish as to try to cheat her. If he had not died when he did, he would
certainly have found himself in prison before long, all the papers relating to
the transaction being in order.
Miss Man, as has been said, had a salacious tongue, and she was,
moreover, in a rough, domineering way, an unaffectedly cheerful person. She,
too, like Tomatoes, preferred men on the whole to women, and so the pension
remained a pension for men. Barney grew very fond of her; she reminded him
of his mother, who had been a circus wardrobe-matron. They were both
women who had seen a good deal of the world and yet remained provincial.
Barney himself was a strictly local character. He did not believe in
universality; he thought in terms of particular places and particular people.
Miss Man was, like himself, a strictly local character. She had her little
pecularities but was not the sort of person one could make into a story.
Similarly, Barney looked on Port Huntlady as a provincial town. "Perhaps
it's the one provincial town left in the world," he said. It had its little
peculiarities but was not the sort of place one could make into a story. A
place was provincial, he said, if you hated it and yet went on living in it
because hating it made it feel like home. Thus many people got excited about
large, worldly cities and pretended to be in love with them, but you had to
hate something first in order to love it, he said, and it was difficult to hate
anything about which there was a lot to be said. There wasn't much to be said
about Port Huntlady. It would have been a good place to feel at home in in a
very short time if it had not been for Lady Port-Huntlady. Barney did not
identify Port Huntlady with Lady Port-Huntlady as the others did. What right
had a universal character to queen it over a little town like Port Huntlady, as
if it were the last place on earth and she the presiding spirit of doom? Why
didn't she take a house in some large, worldly city and give magnificent
parties to other universal characters, like some philosophical princess in a
novel of Tolstoi's? Why didn't she give magnificent parties, anyway? What
fun did one get out of her?
Miss Man did somehow get fun out of Lady Port-Huntlady— by thinking of
her as a wicked little woman who was clever and dainty in local intrigue.
She imagined sinful episodes between her and the various men who made
sudden departures from Port Huntlady. "Ah," she would say knowingly,
"there goes another." And yet she got on very well with Lady Port- Huntlady,
precisely by pretending that she understood her. Lady Port-Huntlady felt
sympathetic towards anyone who made a pretence of understanding things, no
matter by how far they missed the mark; she liked an intelligent atmosphere,
and intelligent expressions on people's faces. Miss Man and Lady Port-
Huntlady generally conversed in a code of ambiguous allusions which were
just as incomprehensible to themselves as to others. But it had the effect of
making Miss Man seem familiar with Lady Port-Huntlady's past. And Lady
Port-Huntlady realized that this suggestion of a mysterious life behind her
sold her, so to speak, to a great many people over whom her influence would
have otherwise been only intellectual. There were some people who had no
respect for a woman unless they felt that she was at heart a bad woman. The
relations between Miss Man and Lady Port-Huntlady were like those
between an illustrious daughter and an ill-bred mother whom she indulges as
a whimsical reminder of old times. Perhaps, indeed, Lady Port- Huntlady had
not always been illustrious.
Although Miss Man had been Mother-Leader of the Salvation of the Flesh
Society, she was not a motherly character, except in the sense that she had a
kindly talent for loving people for their vices; Tomatoes had not loved
people, he had only loved their vices. Thus Miss Man became extremely
fond of Lady Port-Huntlady, seeing her as a wicked person whose
wickedness lay decently hidden under conversational delicacies and who
could therefore satisfy her craving for the cultural side of life without
blunting her appreciation of its baser realities. In the case of Lady Port-
Huntlady's friendship with Dan the Dog, Miss Man saw through the idealistic
devotion of a young man to an older woman of indefinite age, appearance,
history and purpose in life—saw through to the baser motives of the
understanding between them. "That boy wants nothing from her but lessons in
worldliness. And she—well, that sort of flattery makes an older woman
enjoy being an older woman and keeps her from wanting to be a girl again."
And it is true that Dan the Dog's devotion had a tonic effect on Lady Port-
Huntlady. It brought into play the full exquisiteness of her technique, which
she did not in every case have an opportunity to practise: being frivolous
without lessening her seriousness, and serious without lessening her
frivolousness—an imperceptible see-sawing; and taking nothing from people
and yet making them feel that they were giving her their best.
Lady Port-Huntlady certainly determined the tone of life at Port Huntlady.
Yet she was careful not to be 'a personality'. She was an atmosphere, and it
was the others who supported the atmosphere—who did all the work. Had
she allowed herself to be a personality she would have been always under
the strain of having to impose herself on weaker personalities at an expense
of energy disproportionate to the sense of triumph that her power gave her.
There was no major triumph to be got out of her position as the strategical
center of Port Huntlady life, only the cold, private gratification of being safe
from emotional entanglement in other people's affairs while playing a
decisive part in them. But, although she was thus deprived of a drama of her
own, she was spared, on the other hand, the tragic fatigue that she might have
brought on herself had she been a degree less fastidious in her rejection of
the more personal advantages of her position. Nor did she lay herself open to
the attack of vanity: no one could accuse her of holding herself apart. She
exposed herself to the criticism of other people without their being able to
criticize her in any tangible way. She neither wasted nor stifled herself; she
breathed in living air, the air of other people's ephemeral expansions of
themselves, their wasted vanities. As for herself, one might say, simply, that
she had a virginal soul. Is this a crime? Perhaps. But against what? Against
life, perhaps. But are there not other things besides life? Surely it can be no
crime against death to have a virginal soul. But then, how many of us have
patience with such distinctions?
 Miss Man, as has been indicated, came to be a privileged confidante of
Lady Port-Huntlady's. Her hour was not five o'clock but four o'clock—a
'real' cup of tea, as Miss Man said, that took an hour to drink and was only
filled once. "Dear me, how I do talk," Miss Man would say, taking another
frugal sip. Miss Man talked to Lady Port-Huntlady about Lady Port-
Huntlady. "Oh, you're a bad one," she would say. "Now, that Mabick fellow,
he would eat his nose to marry you. But you know your moves months
beforehand, like a Roman general. You keep 'em all guessing and hold on to
the fort." Miss Man was the only resident of Port Huntlady for whom Lady
Port- Huntlady laughed aloud. If Miss Man had ever gone away from Port
Huntlady, Lady Port-Huntlady would have kissed her good-bye.

Cards was jealous of Miss Man. He was jealous of everyone in whom Lady
Port-Huntlady seemed to confide. He did not feel that anyone could ever
prejudice his favour with Lady Port-Huntlady—that was as eternal as Port
Huntlady itself and the fated identity of their interests. But he did not like to
see her perhaps stepping over the boundaries of these interests into more
worldly interests. Their interests were unworldly: to make a world, and Port
Huntlady that world, where life came to a standstill. And Lady Port-Huntlady
was the static goddess of that world, and he was the outside man who
brought in tidbits of human furniture to make things home-like inside. It
spoiled the picture if she herself stepped outside. He was jealous of the
picture.
The purity of the picture was not affected by the people that he brought to
her. They were dead people, people whose hearts he had taken out. Cards
had a knack for taking people's hearts out. He never listened to what they
said and yet did things for them, exactly the things they wanted. And this took
the heart out of people; it made them feel like tables and chairs in a sensible
household, well dusted and polished and tidily arranged but in themselves
just silly bundles of sticks. Lady Port- Huntlady's intimacy with Miss Man
prevented Cards from taking her heart out and reducing her to a silly bundle
of sticks; Miss Man lived. Perhaps Miss Man would have lived even without
Lady Port-Huntlady's partiality. There are people like that, immune in their
own incorrigibility.
People who insisted on keeping alive in Port Huntlady generally killed
themselves, at the end, in a more absolute way than if they had permitted
Cards to take their hearts out. There was Tomatoes, for example, lying quite,
quite dead in the Port Huntlady cemetery. This, by the way, was a small plot
of land behind a tea-shop. It had been presented to the townspeople by the
proprietor of the tea-shop for this very purpose; he had wanted to call his
tea-shop 'Graveyard Gardens'. He did not, of course, call it that, having soon
understood that one could not make jokes in Port Huntlady in such a broad,
farcical, nonchalant spirit; everything had to be carefully thought out and
rather evasive, especially jokes. People in Port Huntlady were neither
squeamish nor humourless, but they liked thoroughness. The tea-shop was
now called the 'No Hurry', the proprietor having borrowed a serious idea
from Mabick: that people in Port Huntlady were all on the verge of suicide
but needed a more openly sympathetic spirit of co-operation to help them go
through with it. The 'No Hurry' might be a sort of afternoon suicide club
where it was taken for granted that people would sooner or later kill
themselves, although on this or this afternoon there was no particular hurry.
Suicide was a matter of getting the right rhythm of inevitability. Mabick
himself always promised himself every night on going to bed to open a vein
the next morning after shaving; but after shaving he looked so smooth and
fresh that it seemed a pity, while before shaving he could never think in an
organized way.
There lay Tomatoes behind the 'No Hurry', although very few people
troubled to notice—as they sat in the open at little grey enamel tables with
that reposeful mastery that comes of people's feeling their lives their own, to
end or prolong as they please—that on the little white stones in the garden
just behind death sat winking at them. The proprietor himself, Jake Adams,
once a prosperous caterer (he had ruined his self- respect by falling
hopelessly in love with a prominent society hostess hopelessly in his debt),
would soon be lying there himself. He would kill himself one day soon,
never having taken the suicide idea seriously and thinking to prove it a joke
like any other joke—something that one meant and then did not. And Mabick
would leave Port Hundady in a sweat of pious horror at the morbid influence
of Port Huntlady on their poor, simple minds—cursing Lady Port-Huntlady
for making it all seem so plausible, so much the fault of the people who came
there rather than the fault of Port Huntlady itself, indeed of Lady Port-
Huntlady herself—cursing himself for having let himself fall so loftily in
love with her (with an amateur philosopher's tendency to find any woman in
the late thirties, who carried herself well, both wise and beautiful).
Perhaps when this happened Miss Man would take over the tea-shop from
Mabick, who had been a sort of patron to it and so inherited it from Jake
along with its debts; perhaps, having agreed to relieve Mabick of it if he
handed it over debt-free, she would take Baby in as a partner, on condition
that he manage it and be responsible for the losses when there were no
profits to share. Perhaps Baby would institute graveyard night-parties at
which the guests romped among the graves, and perhaps one night Miss Man,
who never needed drink to make her lively, would suggest a mock-burial,
and offer herself as the corpse. She herself, perhaps, would make the grave;
and everyone else, being as drunk as she was lively, would stamp the earth
well down over her, except over her face; and to Baby would present itself
the idea of covering her face as well—for a moment, with just a little earth,
just to tease. And then, just to tease, everyone might throw just a little more
earth, and a little more. And then Baby, who did not like complicated
situations, would run away, followed by all the other guests, who would be
getting bored by the introduction into the fun of a perhaps sober element:
might they not be smothering Miss Man to death? And then Barney, left alone
behind, would painfully lower himself to the ground, scratch the earth away
from Miss Man's face, find her unconscious—perhaps dead—and cover her
up again tidily.
Miss Man would disappear, Barney would disappear, Baby would
disappear, and with him Slick and Laura Manilla, to whom Baby was a
stronger tie than their shop, and Dan the Dog as well, to whom Lady Port-
Huntlady was not exactly what could be called a tie, however much he would
have liked to be able to call her that. She took great pains, in fact, to be a tie
to no one. People might have feelings of varying degrees of tenderness about
her, as they wished. What they felt about her, and how they behaved towards
her, was their business. By this time Baby would, in any case, have grown
very rude, not calling at her tea-hour at all, and Cards would have ceased to
be amused by him; perhaps, indeed, Baby might one day have said to himself,
"Oh, hang Lady Port-Huntlady, and hang it all!" And, of course, by this time
Dan the Dog would have developed nameless suspicions about Lady Port-
Huntlady, from nothing happening in their relation beyond the meaninglessly
privileged hours which he was permitted to pass in her little workroom
(where she did nothing), reading or looking at her or talking (not necessarily
getting an answer).
That is, Dan the Dog would already have begun to tell himself that Lady
Port-Huntlady was a fraud (and been encouraged in this feeling by Miss
Man's manner with her), and yet have been unable to break her spell over
him because—well— how could one prove anything against her, and,
furthermore, did he not really, when he was with her, understand everything,
and did not the identification that he made of himself with her give him the
kind of dignity he wanted, a dignity based on no vulgar accomplishment of
his own but merely on his indefinable conviction of her superiority over
everyone, as if she were a secret of his and so the secret of his superiority?
But little by little his suspicions about her being a fraud, and his inability to
describe to himself or to anyone else the quality of his attachment to her in so
many words, would have become a temptation to prove to himself that he
was, at any rate, master of the situation. He would have asked her one day,
"Are you as wise, as right, as perfect as you seem?" And she would have
answered, seeming to smile, but not really smiling, "Yes, of course." And he
would have answered quickly, with a soft, scarcely perceptible catch in his
voice—the soft, scarcely perceptible catch in the voice of any bargainer who
tries to cover up with a witticism the fact that he is bargaining, "Will you put
that in writing, so that I can sue you for getting my friendship on false
pretences if I should find you otherwise?"
And then, in answer, she would have picked up a pen and begun writing
things down on a large sheet of paper in a small, clear hand. And he would
have waited, hating her more and more as she went on steadily from line to
line, until she filled the page. Then he would have got up and started to leave
the room, like a lover disgusted with intimacies he himself has insisted on.
And she would have begun another sheet, not turning round. And he would
have stood at the door, unable to leave. And then she would have folded the
sheets, put them in an envelope, written something on the envelope, sealed it.
And only then, getting up and handing him the envelope with an unanswerable
gesture combining forgiveness and absolute dismissal, would she have
definitely smiled—not at him so much as at his departure. And he would
have put the envelope in his pocket and left, shutting the door, stepping back
again to shut it better.
He would not have looked to see what was written on the outside of the
envelope until he had left the house: Dan the Dog. He would not have
considered before that this was actually his name in Port Huntlady, although
sometimes he had heard Lady Port-Huntlady call him that to other people—
affectionately, as he had thought. He would have walked home in fast-wilting
grandeur of person. At home he would begin packing his trunk. The dear little
house would now seem a slavish little house; yes, he had been slavish, he
would decide. Baby, not asking questions, would have opened the envelope,
Dan having thrown it aside with his hat. Baby had studied psychology at the
University. His studies had strengthened a point of view he was born with—
as studies should: that there was not much difference between people.
Without meaning to offend, psychologists do not regard the personal affairs
of people as their private property; they do not believe in the existence of
barriers at which one person leaves off and another begins. So Baby, puzzled
by Dan's behaviour, and seeing an unopened letter that might perhaps explain
it, would probably have opened the letter. And in it he would have found a
detailed bill from Lady Port-Huntlady to Dan: meals, petty loans, personal
favours, all nicely evaluated, and a large general debt—'Lessons in
Understanding Things'—reckoned accurately by Dan's hours with her, which
had always been fixed hours (not counting the tea-hour, this being the subject
of a note pointing out that no charge was being made for it).
And Baby, always cynically delighted to intervene in confused affairs of
sentiment when they reduced themselves to clear economic terms, would
have gone to Lady Port-Huntlady to settle Dan the Dog's debt with her. And
perhaps Baby would have ended up with a secret admiration for Lady Port-
Huntlady. For he would expect to find her angry, and to be able to punish her
anger by humiliating her with an offer to pay Dan the Dog's bill, which she
had perhaps written out in a fit of petulance, not meaning it to be taken
seriously. But Lady Port-Huntlady, receiving Baby in her work-room, would
have taken the money and been charmed to take it, as all self- possessed
people are charmed to take money. And Baby would have been charmed to
give it, and have forgotten to be rude, and have forgotten too about Dan the
Dog, who by this time might perhaps have taken a train out of Port Huntlady,
expecting to be followed on the next day by Baby. And perhaps Baby would
not have followed. Perhaps Baby would have gone on sitting in Lady Port-
Huntlady's work-room, and perhaps Miss Man, had she not by that time been
dead, would have come in for her private tea-hour. And who can say what
new, blasphemous Port Huntlady might not have begun to be concocted
between them?
This was exactly the sort of thing that Cards was afraid of with Miss Man;
Baby never occurred to him as a possible danger, nor was he—nor, indeed,
was Miss Man. Cards knew that he could trust Lady Port-Huntlady; but he
could not help being jealous of Miss Man. He knew that in the end nothing
would be left but Lady Port-Huntlady and himself, and he no more than—yes
—a button to press when she felt lonely; and out of the nothingness
surrounding her would come whatever conversational ghost she fancied. And
he would be no more than a button; but this was better than being a ghost.
And he did not want there to be any other buttons. Miss Man might flatter
herself that she was a button and have to be put down, and that kind of thing
delayed the end, when nothing would be left but Lady Port-Huntlady and
himself. He did not like to seem anxious—in fact, he was not anxious. He
was quite certain about the way things would turn out and could afford not to
be anxious. But all the same he could not help being irritated by Miss Man,
how she sat up close to Lady Port- Huntlady and always seemed on the point
of poking her with her elbow nastily—making him feel how far off the end
was, when nothing would be left but Lady Port-Huntlady and himself, and he
no more than a button—making him feel how much more life still had to
come to Port Huntlady and exhaust itself, how many more not really merry
Foolish Island picnics must be got over.
But if Miss Man would not have disappeared from Port Huntlady in the
manner already described, it is certain that she would have disappeared one
day at Foolish Island during a picnic undertaken with the object, principally,
of cheering up Miss Bookworth. Miss Bookworth, it will be remembered,
now had two babies to look after, the baby adopted by herself and Diana, and
Diana's own baby. Miss Bookworth did not complain; she had an unpleasant
life, and she was glad that she had an unpleasant life. She disapproved of
babies, of herself, of everyone who came to Port Huntlady—of Miss Man
most of all. Miss Man dealt with her disapproval as a mother treats her
child's dislike of having its face washed, not believing that it really minds.
She did not believe that Miss Bookworth really disliked her, or being
cheered up, or going on picnics to Foolish Island. But Miss Bookworth
consented to go on these picnics only because Lady Port-Huntlady also went.
Miss Bookworth thought Lady Port-Huntlady noble. To her mind Lady Port-
Huntlady suffered because she understood everything; she admired her
because she did not show her suffering. Miss Bookworth did not claim to
suffer, because she did not claim to understand everything, but she did claim
that she had no enthusiasms, and this was true.
At that first five-o'clock of Dan's, Baby's and Slick's she distinctly said,
after a soft remark of Lady Port-Huntlady's— "What one does for others
makes one old and ugly, but what one does for oneself comes as easy as
breathing"—she distinctly said, "And never do anything for yourself, it's
always someone else that benefits in the end anyway." And at the picnic
during which Miss Man would in any case have disappeared, and Miss
Bookworth's two babies along with her, Miss Bookworth would have given
many similar bitter twists to Lady Port-Huntlady's soft remarks. Miss
Bookworth made things strike home; she interpreted everything literally. She
said that Port Huntlady was hell, and she meant this literally. People found
their fate there, and fate was never anything happy. If they ran away from Port
Huntlady they were running away from fate. But in the end there was nothing
but fate. In the end there was nothing. Some people, when they first came to
Port Huntlady, said, "Isn't it heavenly?" without really meaning it. Then little
by little they began to hate it there. Why? Because there was no such place as
heaven. Port Huntlady seemed heavenly at first because the strangest things
happened so naturally there. Yes, fate, than which nothing was stranger,
happened naturally, if you didn't resist. But in hell you couldn't resist. In Port
Huntlady you couldn't resist. It took all the meaningless strength and fight out
of you, if you stayed there long enough. Miss Bookworth did not believe in
fighting fate. It was curious, considering this, what a militant person she was
in some ways.
Once in the boat-house, having conscientiously prevented the babies from
falling overboard several times during the crossing, Miss Bookworth would
have sent them below to play with the ginger cats—"to get scratched," as she
would have said, "and to learn manners." Miss Bookworth was a very
conventional person. "Manners mean swallowing disappointment and
digesting it well," she would say. "The things children would like to do to
cats!" And Miss Bookworth's babies would have tried to do all these things
to the affectionate ginger cats, while she sat upstairs at an appreciative
distance from Lady Port- Huntlady, Miss Man, of course, edging up close as
usual. Miss Bookworth would have rocked in and out of the air-cushion at
her back, let out a little air to make it less buoyant and said, "These are better
than ordinary cushions, not so much give. It's a pity they can't be got here."
And Lady Port-Huntlady would have said, "If you want another, perhaps
Cards can find you one—he can produce almost anything. He'll say, 'Ah, yes,
as a matter of fact I have an air-cushion somewhere, if I can only remember
where.' " And Miss Man would have leaned over the arm of her chair and
confided loudly to Lady Port-Huntlady, "Cards is full of mysteries, and the
less said the better, what?" And Lady Port-Huntlady would have looked
sideways at Miss Man and away again, just failing to nod. And perhaps,
while they were sitting there, Miss Bookworth's babies would be shoving a
lunch-hamper full of new kittens (from two new litters) towards the water to
launch it like a boat. They would follow it out as it sank and had to be pulled
up again, gradually stumbling in deeper and deeper. And sounds of mother-
rage from the cats on the shore would tear into the inert quiet of the lounge.
How Miss Man would have given her life in vain to save Miss
Bookworth's babies, not being able to swim well and taking less note of the
current than she might have had she not at the same time been involved in
upbraiding Miss Bookworth for her coldness in the most unforgivable terms
she could think up under the pressure of feeling that she was doing something
that she did not want to do and that would not, moreover, make Miss
Bookworth like her any better; and how Cards would have watched the scene
disgustedly from the store-room window, secretly wishing that it would end
as it would have been bound to end had Miss Man not been perhaps already
disposed of in an equally final way; and how Lady Port- Huntlady would
have consoled the cats by bringing down the remains of their lunch from the
lounge; and how Miss Bookworth would have left Port Huntlady soon after
to take up a post as secretary to a wealthy invalid whose hobby was
corresponding with patients in tuberculosis sanatoria, in which he had spent
much of his own life; and how a story may go on indefinitely unless there is
perfect understanding at the start of the limitations that keep a story from
being anything but a story.. . .
So we might go on, were there not perfect understanding between us about
the futility of trying to give more meaning to certain things than they have—
things that attach themselves like hollow parasites to the really important
things and that yet—can we deny it—interest us perhaps more than the really
important things? And even because—can we not admit it here—they demand
of us just what sympathy for wasted time that we would not otherwise know
how to express, unless by wasting time ourselves? Indeed, do we not, even
the best of us, prefer to waste time somehow or other to doing nothing at all,
so long as we are not reminded—for the time being—that there are more
important things to think about? But the business between Cards and Lady
Port-Huntlady should give us a lesson in the dangers of making a story too
unimportant in our desire to prove to ourselves that a story is not very
different from the things that, in the ordinary way, make up life. For do we
not all of us now feel that we have been trifling with time perhaps a little too
recklessly? And will there not now be a tendency to plunge a little too
earnestly into the really important things, perhaps with a not altogether
successful result? An eventuality that we might perhaps have avoided if we
had made something more of the business between Cards and Lady Port-
Huntlady. If we had, say, hinted at an ingenious machine (or idea) for making
artificial turning-points in the lives of people who did not actually live—by
sweeping them into an artificial death where they could pretend to one
another that they had actually lived, and sweeping them back again to where
they had come from, if they survived, as to actual living again. And explained
how, in being swept back again to where they came from, they left many of
their possessions behind—false fragments of their false souls, in fact. But
have we not, after all, hinted at, and explained, exactly this? And is the
trouble not, after all, that no amount of ingenuity can save a story from
seeming, in the end, just a story—just a piece of verbal luggage, belonging to
anybody who cares to be bothered with it—to Cards on Lady Port-Huntlady's
behalf, or to Lady Port-Huntlady on behalf of that Lady Whatever-Her-Name-
Is who absurdly bothers herself to be interested in (not to mention
understanding) everything? Or, at least, is it not our good fortune to be in a
position to distribute our interest without prejudice and deceive our sincerity
as we please—in the confidence that at the appropriate moment we shall tire
and turn away, leaving the door of truth open behind us?

MISS BANQUETT, OR
THE POPULATING OF COSMANIA

l
Miss BANQUETT undertook this voyage because she was beautiful, not for a
holiday. In beauty there are no holidays; beauty is a steady occupation. Miss
Banquett had made her beauty known to everyone possible in her own
country. She had then to undertake this voyage, to make herself still better
known. In a more systematic world Miss Banquett would not have needed to
make all these efforts herself; it would have been sufficient for her to be
beautiful to be known everywhere as beautiful. Instead, Miss Banquett had
not only to be beautiful, but to make herself known as beautiful. For the
unsystematic world in which she lived was founded on syllogisms; such as,
that one is only a thing that it is possible to be if one is known to be it, that
beautiful is a thing that it is possible to be, and that therefore if one is not
known to be beautiful, one is not beautiful.
And so, when Miss Banquett's ship suffered shipwreck and she was cast
alone on a strange shore, her first thought was to acquaint the inhabitants of
the country with her beauty. But, though for seven days she sought them, and
though in seven days she had been everywhere imaginable, she could find no
inhabitants in this country, and she was forced to conclude that there were
none.
And not only were there no inhabitants; there was no anything. What was
Miss Banquett to do? If she was at all, she was beautiful; but she was not
beautiful, she was not, unless she was known to be beautiful. And she could
not be known to be beautiful without people to know her to be beautiful. Two
things were clear: first that this country had no inhabitants; second, that it
must soon have them if her memory that in the place she came from she had
been beautiful was not fast to disappear, and so herself.
And thus began the populating of Cosmania by Miss Banquett. And
everything happened in the most methodical manner possible. For this was
not the ordering of things already existent and disordered: the original
disorder would have lingered on, then, in the violence with which it was
necessary to impose and keep order. It was an ordering of things that
amounted to a bringing of them into existence; it was an arrangement of them
not according to their existence, but rather according to their non-existence—
not according to their disorder, but rather according to how they came into
her head. She brought them to her instead of herself to them; she was
beautiful by will, not logic. What Miss Banquett did, in fine, was to recast
these seven empty days as days she had created— not days that had merely
come to pass. And had she not created them: were they not empty? From
waning memory she now squeezed a here and a there; here were the seven
days which were hers, there were the seven days which came to pass.
There was all uncertainty and disorder. There was the world of knowledge,
which out of hearsay, or uncertainty, made facts —gossip reported in the
language of truth. There was all uncertainty and disorder so extreme that it
seemed an arrangement of certainty and order—since certainty and order
themselves were not known.
Here was the world of self—that is, the world of Miss Banquett, which she
made out of fear of uncertainty. And this was the difference between the
world of self and the world of knowledge: that the world of knowledge was
only an endless prolongation of uncertainty, while the world of self was a
prolongation of fear of uncertainty. On this difference hinges the whole story.
For in the world of knowledge nothing true could happen because of the
uncertainty which was the knowledge. But in Miss Banquett's world, fear of
uncertainty, on which it was founded, could turn into a consciousness of
uncertainty, which could turn into a desire for certainty, which could turn into
order. And this is exactly what happened. Miss Banquett made a world of
self, she made order. Not that order is certainty. Order is a world, and a
world is a prolongation. Miss Banquett's order was only a desire for
certainty spelt in a wakeful fear of uncertainty. The wakeful fear sharpened
the desire for certainty, but it also delayed certainty, which cannot come until
all that is less than certainty—all that makes fear—goes. Certainty is desire's
end, truth is certainty's end; but it must all be as an instant which devours the
time that went before it, and permits no time after it. This instant we must not
see Miss Banquett as having yet reached.
The beauty of Miss Banquett, then, was as far as the world of knowledge
could go in knowledge. And when Miss Banquett came to be alone with
nothing but her beauty, she began to have a great fear of uncertainty; she
began to realize that her beauty was uncertain. So out of her beauty she made
a world of self. Or it might be put in this way: that having (all because of the
magnitude of her beauty) got beyond knowledge, there was nothing to do—if
she was not to disappear—but think.
2
First was the first day, then was the second day: Miss Banquett made Day
and Night, a rhythm of everlastingness. On the third day she provided herself
with a second self, of lesser but more manifest beauty than her very self; and
this she called Earth. And Earth she provided with an orderly growth,
sufficient in quantity and variety to the appetite for quantity and variety which
her beauty gave her. And it must be understood that the seed of all this was in
herself. Then Miss Banquett said: "I have made Day and Night, and a
restrained second self of me to be with these patiently; but I shall need to
make also an overflowing third self of me in which to flee widely from the
constrictions of appearance when impatience comes upon me like infinite
doubt, and it seems for the moment more truth to have been never, in no
wise."
So Miss Banquett made a sun and a moon and a round number of stars and
an unbounded stretch of forgetfulness. And there were now Days and Nights.
And Miss Banquett said: "My Heavens are beautiful." This was the fourth
day. On the fifth day she suffered extremely from pride of melancholy, that all
here was herself—although she would not have had it otherwise. And so
there were seas. Having made the sea she was pleased, as after tears; and in
this pleasure she sent birds up into her Heavens, which told her pleasure, and
fish down into her seas which told her melancholy. "My Birds, my Fish, my
Earth, my Heavens," she said, "are beautiful." But she meant: "I am beautiful,
they are the ways of my world, which I have made out of my beauty."
And the pride that she had on the fifth day became on the sixth day love, so
that on the sixth day she made creatures, some that could be sensible of her
beauty, which were human, some that could be insensible, which were brute,
and the second to be dear by innocence of her beauty, and the first by
intelligence of it. On the seventh day she rested. Her thought stopped. And the
seventh day was the day of things.
 Miss Banquett's world was now all around her. The rest was leisure to
examine it and to find in it prolonged proof of her beauty, which was now her
thought. Day and Night, Land and Water and the Sky—these were only
memory-foundations. And the flowering things and the swimming things and
the flying things, and the brute creatures which were insensible to her beauty,
and the things of the seventh day which were as something else and yet
nothing else—these were all mere scenic emanations of her beauty. But she
had a people, and these were its dramatic gist. They were the citizens of her
thought, and she was to them the thought of their citizenship. And she went
among them.
She went first among her black people. These lived in the hottest part of
Cosmania. They discovered Miss Banquett asleep under a palm-tree, which
was sacred to her, as was, likewise, the drink brewed from its tenderer parts,
which took seven years to be brought to perfection. Miss Banquett awoke in
a large hut, unfurnished except for the central dais where she lay and
undecorated except for a large picture of her at the back, opposite the
entrance. In this picture, which was the first thing Miss Banquett noticed, she
was not only without clothes, but she was also black, like the people among
whom she found herself. She was black and she was naked and she was
beautiful, and she lay on a dais in the middle of a large round hut, and she
was worshipped by a round number of black people all of whom rightly
believed that they had been made by her. They had all drunk of the drink
which was sacred to her and were smiling, and a tall priest, upon whose
arms her face was tattooed a round number of times, gave her to drink of it
too, and she too smiled.
Smiling and naked and black Miss Banquett descended from her dais and
walked among her people, who were also smiling and naked and black. With
the tall priest at her side she walked out into the black country. In this country
there was no work. Red-haired apes tossed fruit from the trees, which the
people caught and ate tidily on the spot. And because there was no work
there was no talking. They smiled up to the apes, who grinned down at them.
They smiled to each other all day long, for there was nothing else to do.
Their smiling, their blackness and their nakedness was their whole story,
which might be otherwise summed up by saying that they depended on Miss
Banquett (whom they prettily called "Mother"), with childish confidence, for
everything. "These people," Miss Banquett said to herself, smiling,
"represent the dark, lazy, self-contented side of my beauty." She walked
among them till she came to the palm-tree under which they had found her,
which also marked the end of their country. Here a marriage was made
between her and the tall priest, the form of which was that both of them were
made drunk with the drink that was sacred to her, and in this condition put to
sleep under the tree. Before she fell asleep Miss Banquett whispered to the
tall priest: "They will live as long as you keep them bemused by my beauty."
"And that will be," the priest whispered back, "as long as you wish."

3
Miss Banquett went next among her yellow people, who lived in a sun-bright
but somewhat historically sun-bright portion of Cosmania. They were a
laughing people, but precise, and hence cruel; though nowhere were there any
signs of cruelty. Their cruelty lay simply in the preciseness with which they
laughed. "These people," Miss Banquett said to herself when she had
observed them, "represent the tireless, fastidious side of my beauty, its ever-
ancient preoccupation with itself." And she fell among them in pieces of
glass, which they put together into a correct image and called their
Ancestress. And they placed her on a shining hill, from which she could see
all they did and hear all they said. For their voices were long and sharp and
thin, and tinkled slyly with laughter; this was how they prayed.
All these people were so selfishly precise with each other that they were
identical. Their skin was mere polish; they had the immaculate fanaticism of
glass. Each of them lived in a triangular house, the narrowest wall of which
was a mirror, the other two (of open glass) converging sharply to a door just
wide enough to pass through walking out backwards. In the heart of the
mirror was an ever-ancient memory of Miss Banquett, to which they groomed
themselves glassily and with cruel, laughing reverence. Each of them wore a
black wig, because it was the shiniest of wigs, and each a white coat,
because it was the coldest of coats, and each slippers of gilded glass,
because these were the brightest and most precise slippers possible, and also
the most beautifully impossible to walk in; so that, instead of walking, each
stood fastidiously at the door of his house, his back to all the others, ill-
temperedly pattering golden footsteps of the heavy, clear resonance of glass,
which mingled with their laughter and made it neither merry nor sad.
Miss Banquett, or rather the image of Miss Banquett, saw everything from
her shining hill; for the roofs of these houses were of glass as well as the
walls. She saw their heartless pantomime within, and she heard their
heartless laughter and pattering when they stood without, and she was coldly
happy in these mandarins who hated one another for her sake and who also
hated her with shrewd courtesy.
 She was their Ancestress. She was of glass and in pieces, but fitted into a
whole, from courtesy. And it was obvious that in this situation she must
couple, if she was ever to get out of it: she must take some part in it, if she
was ever to extricate herself from it. And she chose what seemed to her the
yellowest of the mandarins (though all were alike) and made a marriage with
him. We may call Miss Banquett's yellow husband Mandarin E. Immediately
after the marriage, which occurred by Miss Banquett's fiat, without even the
attendance of the bridegroom himself, a great change came over this portion
of Cosmania. Without warning Mandarin E was suddenly attacked by all his
fellows, though they never looked at him, on the ground that he had made
himself yellower and sharper and brighter than themselves, which they
declared to be an impossible thing. They fell upon him, and then fell away;
and he was gone, and his house, and every sign that he was or was not. And it
came to them to look up to Miss Banquett; and she too was gone. Then, in
their astonishment, they looked for the first time at themselves, which set up
in them a laughter greater than any before, in which violence was added to
cruelty. From which they soon fell to weeping, and from weeping they went
into a yellow study, and from this into a laughter so unlike laughter that
Mandarin E and Miss Banquett, on the other side of the shining hill, shivered
in their nuptial conference.
"These," whispered Miss Banquett to Mandarin E, "are a cruelly literal-
minded people." "Yes," replied Mandarin E, "they will make history of all
this. They will say that you fell among them in pieces of glass, and that they
put you together and set you on top of the shining hill, to be worshipped in a
way appropriate to your antiquity; and that you loved among them a certain
Mandarin E, who might have been any one of them and whom for this reason
they destroyed; that by his destruction they became an immortal people; and
that the contemplation of their Ancestress, Miss Banquett, was by this event
turned inward upon themselves. And their minds will grow long, sharp, thin
nails, as it were, which will dig into their thought of you and mark upon it
precise stigmata, which will be painless to you and to them." "And you?"
asked Miss Banquett. "I," he answered, "am only Mandarin E, their heartless
but ever-ancient love of you. If you fall asleep in my arms, you will wake
alone, and that is all that there is to be said of me."
At this, Miss Banquett, struck by the humour of her position, began to laugh.
She had, in disappearing from the top of the shining hill, lost much of her
glassiness but little of her gaiety. Mandarin E held her fast, for she had (in
truth) been but lately mended; and, as she went on laughing, her seams knit
together loosely, and a drowsy liveliness circulated through her whole body,
and she fell asleep. And while she slept the shining hill removed from her,
and everything behind it. And she awoke alone.
"There is nothing remarkable," said Miss Banquett, "in my awakening
alone." When she was thoroughly persuaded of this, which did not take long,
since she was awake and alone, she said to herself: "Indeed, there can be
nothing remarkable in anything."

4
For by a god-like effort of will she was indeed alone, and by an almost
humanly capricious phrasing of her state she was alone with herself in a
world of her own where all was as she pleased, and therefore in perfect
order in no matter what order, and therefore not remarkable. Here Miss
Banquett had supplanted the knowledge of her beauty, which was only
knowledge, with her beauty itself, which was she herself—and therefore not
remarkable. She had refined her mind from the equivocal largeness of a
world of others to an absolute size—which permitted her to carry it all in her
own head.
"How homely, how not remarkable everything is here," she said to herself.
"In fact, it is just what you—that is, I—would expect."
"O lolly, lolly, lolly-o," at this moment arose all around Miss Banquett. It
was a numerous but not disorderly crowd sitting at her feet in an attitude of
petition.
"Beautiful Miss Banquett," they said murmurously, which immediately put
her at her ease, "we prayed for you to come among us, and you have come.
We are the cloudy people, and this is the cloudy country. We are the vapour
of your breath, which is your beauty's spirit of generosity, O Benefactress
who have cloudily bestowed on each of us a damp, grateful soul. We are
grateful, but beyond gratitude we are powerless. For we are unsubstantial
and hence unnumbered among ourselves, and our praise of you is a mere
mingling, a barometric jargon."
"Dear people," replied Miss Banquett in great happy breaths, "you are the
spirit of my spirit, and I would not have you otherwise. I will not add
substance to you but take away substance. I will perfect you in what you are."
And she blew in among them in the shape of a monster woman-cloud,
scattering them away from one another in pious panic; and she passed to the
other side of them like a storm, and hung there solicitously, ready to
disappear as soon as all was well. When this had happened and the cloudy
people had recovered from their panic, they discovered in themselves certain
differences that had not previously existed; and by these differences they
arranged themselves in three ranks, choir-like; and the differences were the
three inflections of gratitude; and the result was a harmonious music in Miss
Banquett's ears, and a harmonious fragrance in her nostrils, which was all
that could be desired, either by themselves or by her.
The first inflection was produced by an eccentricity of form in the first third
of them: these now had, in addition to their general formlessness, an
elephantine proboscis, which enriched the vague murmur of their gratitude
with a note of whimsy. The second inflection was produced by an
eccentricity of form in the second third of them: these now had, in addition to
their general formlessness, a duck-like bill, which enriched the vague
murmur of their gratitude with a note of resolution. And the third inflection
was produced by an eccentricity of form in the third third of them: these now
had, in addition to their general formlessness, a lionish jaw, which enriched
the vague murmur of their gratitude with a note of boldness.
And the result was, as has been said, a harmonious music in Miss
Banquett's ears, and a harmonious fragrance in her nostrils. But as she had
blown in among them in the shape of a monster woman-cloud, so they now
addressed themselves to her in the shape of a monster whimsical, resolute,
bold man-voice, which was but their old murmurousness become something
more of a spokesman. "Dear Benefactress," he said to her hydra-headedly,
"we are the cloudy people, and this is the cloudy country, and you are a
beautiful monster woman-cloud, and I love you."
Whereupon Miss Banquett, in the shape in which he perceived her,
permitted herself to be embraced. And all was well. And she disappeared in
a sunset of emotions which later in the cloudless dark she found to be her
own.
"All is well, all is well," rang a harmonious music in her ears, while a
harmonious fragrance filled her nostrils, ecstatically suffocating. And she
said, "All is well, all is well. I am beautiful and love myself dearly, but
without horrid envy of anyone else. No one could call me aggressive."
She was content. She smoothed out her skirt, rumpled by self-analysis,
travel, and religion, and walked up and down in the dark for as long as she
should remain undisturbed— which, considering the general situation, could
not be for very long.

5
Scarcely any time at all could have passed, when Miss Banquett was
suddenly seized by unknown hands and carried hurriedly through hard snow
into the country of the tawny-faced. And she did not consider this experience
irregular, since she had, after all, anticipated everything that might happen
here by creating it beforehand in the large; the particulars leaped not insanely
out of the methodical surprise for which, her work being done, she now had
endless leisure. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that in spite of herself she
was a little taken aback by this rough kidnapping. And, what is more, she
fainted, as was perhaps best in the circumstances.
She came to herself in a small snow-house. A worried, tawny- faced
woman was bending over her.
"Great Physician," she said, "we do not like to disturb you, but we are all
very, very ill."
"My dear Sister," replied Miss Banquett, "what is the matter with you?"
"We worship you, great Physician, in the way appointed, but we are still
very, very cold."
Miss Banquett considered. "I am afraid," she said, "that I cannot change
you, for you represent the solemn, indeed gloomy, indeed obstinate, side of
my beauty. Is not this so, Sister?"
"It is indeed so, great Physician," replied she whom we may call Sister
Snow.
"It is therefore clear that I may do nothing to make you happier. But I shall
think what can be done to make you more comfortable without changing your
nature."
"Your will be done, great Physician," said Sister Snow. And she withdrew
from Miss Banquett's presence. Without, a certain number of tawny-faced
women awaited her (the entire population of this country, in fact), all looking
very, very ill— because so very, very cold; and they knew from the
expression on Sister Snow's face (she being their Sister Superior) that
something would be done for them which would not, however, really change
things. So they bowed their heads with their usual solemnity. And their faces
were as tawny as ever. And they looked gloomily down upon their girdles of
frozen green myrtle and longed without hope for coats of fur.
"I cannot," said Miss Banquett, appearing before them, "permit you to grow
fur, as you must realize: it would be contrary to your nature, which is to be
cold and miserable, and so to that side of my beauty, and therefore do
discredit both to you and to me." At which they bowed their heads as always
with that resigned air characteristic of obstinate people.
 "But I can, as I promised Sister Snow, make you a little more comfortable
than you are," she continued. "I will marry you all to polar bears."
To which the tawny-faced women made no reply or change of countenance
but persisted in their characteristic attitude of ceremonial discomfiture. Miss
Banquett turned and left them (not for long) to go in search of polar bears.
And they were not hard to find, for all that she might wish for was here; she
had but to look about her, and her will was done. For she willed in that
incontrovertible language which we might call dynamic description.
In a few moments Miss Banquett returned with a certain number of polar
bears, all insensible to her beauty but ready to do her command, which was
all that was required of them. They were in first-class spirits, moreover, as
became the occasion, and without specific instructions danced up each one of
them to a tawny-faced woman and hugged her sincerely, to which gruff
embrace none of the women responded, they sinking only more deeply
(though perhaps now more comfortably) into their accustomed melancholy
inertia. The bears, however, were not to be so easily repulsed. In fact, they
took very little notice of the melancholy inertia of the tawny-faced women,
tumbling them to the ground and forcing upon them various bearish
endearments; which the tawny-faced women did not exactly resist, but which,
on the other hand, they did not exactly encourage. And, as Miss Banquett had
promised, they were no happier, but a little more comfortable. And when the
hurly-burly of the bears had somewhat subsided, she performed a simple
nuptial rite upon all of them, which consisted in transferring the girdle of
frozen green myrtle which each tawny-faced woman wore about her middle,
to the neck of the polar bear with whom she had coupled. And after this, all
except Miss Banquett fell into a sound sleep, each tawny-faced woman in her
snow-house warmed by a fond bear whom she did not exactly encourage in
his furry facetiousness, but whom, on the other hand, she did not exactly
repulse. And it is a fact that after this procedure they no longer complained of
feeling very, very ill (because so very, very cold), although no change of
expression could have been detected on their tawny, expressionless faces. It
even seemed that the more comfortable the bears made them, the more sullen
they became.
"But," said Miss Banquett, "I cannot permit this to go too far. I must retain
at least one of the tawny-faced in a state of sulky communion with me, or they
will all forget me, to their discredit and mine." For the tawny-faced women,
although they had lost none of their sulkiness, were no longer as eloquent as
they had been. Sexual experience had a disorganizing effect on them, as it has
on everyone. The best way, Miss Banquett decided, would be to deprive one
of them of her bear, in order that she might remind the others of The Classical
Period.
Her choice naturally fell upon Sister Snow, who had been the first to
complain, and who had originally emboldened herself to kidnap Miss
Banquett. Now Sister Snow's bear was the burliest bear of them all. So Miss
Banquett appeared to him in the guise of a tawny-faced woman sunk in an
inertia so extremely melancholy as to be irresistible. And the bear deserted
Sister Snow and seized Miss Banquett and carried her off. And Sister Snow
was left crying: "O great Physician, I am very, very ill." But as the other
tawny-faced women had nothing to complain of, she could not this time
embolden herself to kidnap Miss Banquett. And so she became a ghost of the
past and kept the others mindful of what they had been—what they really
were. And in this way they did not lose hold. It would have caused great
confusion all round if they had become detached from Miss Banquett. They
would have become silly, lively, gruesome harpies of no particular place; in
sum, there would have been a hell in Miss Banquett's world, which would
have meant that the rest of it was merely a sentimental experiment. It is
always well to include even the most frigid friends in one's sphere of
intimacies, for otherwise they turn into dumb, unanswerable challengers and
make one's most glowing experiences seem all rather affected. Thus do the
polar regions have a peculiar psychological value for the rest of the world.
But, as things turned out, the shock of the bear's embrace threw Miss
Banquett into another faint, and she awoke, as might be expected, alone.

Yes, indeed, Miss Banquett now led a very odd life—odd precisely because
it was as she wished it. Yet not odd: it was her life. It was like a book that
she had written to please no one but herself; and now she was sitting down to
read it at her leisure. We might say that she had read her previous life out of a
book. But that was a book written by everybody and anybody, not by herself,
and so expressing their beauty rather than her own. As for being beautiful,
she might read of it there in her own familiar name; but she had to guess that
her name meant herself, since it was only a name in the book, not herself.
Here all was different. For, although she read out of a book, it was a book of
her own making. She knew that her name meant herself. Or, we might say, in
the one book her beauty was factual—that is, of others' making, and therefore
false; while in the other it was fictional—that is, of her own making, and
therefore true. But it was indeed a very odd life that she now led. And yet not
odd.
And next she went among her blue people, whose calling might be said to
be the same as her own. But what a time she had! You see, they were really
not- blue, but rather blue-in-the- face; for they were authors. They
represented the outspoken but cautious side of her beauty, and she rightly felt
that they had strong claims upon her. For what was outspokenness in her was
ambition in them, and what was cautiousness in her was timidity in them.
They would, indeed, all have been nervous wrecks had she not
conscientiously imbued them with a critical sense—the feeling that there was
still a great deal more to be written. Their hands, with which they wrote,
were a-tingle, but their feet, with which they hesitated, were numb, and their
faces, with which they regretted what they wrote, as being not the last word
on their subject, were blue. And so they went on, hoping to write something
that would not disappoint them, but growing continually more and more
disappointed and therefore more and more blue-in-the-face. And being all in
Miss Banquett's pay, so to speak, they were of course obliged to write more
or less in the same way, and to keep more or less to Miss Banquett's pace,
and to advance more or less her meaning. Yet they had, as well, to keep a
little behind her meaning, in order to preserve their individualities. For once
they wrote the last word they would all be Miss Banquett. They all wanted to
write the last word—in that, and only in that, lay true glory; but equally they
did not want to write it, since true glory would dissolve them in Miss
Banquett's glory. Miss Banquett's glory lay in the perfect realization of
herself which she was achieving. They, too, were trying to achieve a perfect
realization of her. But because they loved their work they did not want it to
stop; and the only way to keep it going was to achieve always a somewhat
imperfect realization of Miss Banquett. And yet, equally, because they loved
their work, they were bound to regret the imperfect quality of their
achievements.
And they called Miss Banquett their Muse, and themselves her Votaries.
And they did not make hay with Miss Banquett's beauty, but delayed it in a
kind of worshipful bad weather which they called their art, and for which she
rewarded them with prizes. For she did not herself want the last word to be
written—yet; she did not want to hurry herself. And they were blue-in-the-
face from disappointment. And Miss Banquett rewarded them with prizes, as
if to say: "It is well to regret that the last word has not been written, and it is
well that the last word has not been written."
 She rewarded each of them with prizes. And each prize was like the other,
but went by a different name. And each prize was a medal engraved on one
side with the legend 'Continuez'; and the reverse of the medal was blank.
Thus Miss Banquett helped them to keep their minds on their work. And they
were, on the whole, steady-going fellows. This was exactly what had begun
to worry Miss Banquett. They were almost too steady- going. She had thought
that by imbuing them with a critical sense she would encourage their
professional vanity and at the same time discourage any vulgar spirit of
competition—there could be no competition, except as a joke, where Miss
Banquett was concerned. But they seemed incapable of joking. "If only I
were not so serious myself," Miss Banquett said to herself.
Then the idea came to her of creating a new prize—the Prix Désespoir. "I
will give this one to the true-bluest of them all," she said to herself. And
having been given the prize, the true- bluest of them all fell into an uncritical
ecstasy and no longer took care what he wrote; and what he wrote was very
foolish and last-wordish; and he was not ashamed. Miss Banquett carried
him off to her closet, to have her pleasure of him. How immature she felt!
"No, no," she said to herself, "the story is far from finished."
And having had her pleasure of him she returned him to his fellows. They
were rather ashamed of him, but they kept him among them because he made
them feel wise, in criticizing him. And some criticized him more severely
than others. And so some became professional critics, and others remained
authors. And the authors no longer cared what they wrote; and what they
wrote was very foolish and last-wordish; and they were not ashamed—they
felt that they were pleasing their Muse. And the critics said, "This is all very
pleasant in its way, but the story is far from finished." And there was much
coming and going among them; everyone was saying a great deal, and there
was no danger of a sudden cessation of activity. And Miss Banquett felt that
this was how she wanted things to be for the time being.

But Miss Banquett was not happy. She was so powerful that she was only,
after all, a figurehead. She was so powerful that she had nothing to do but be
powerful; that is, she was entirely vested in the instruments by which her
power was expressed. So she decided that she would for seven days be as
one of her own instruments; to be something definite. Not that Miss Banquett
wished to back out: for, even had she so wished, she had now nowhere to
back out into—she had gone too far. She had, because of the compulsion in
her beauty, wished to experience finality; and in order to experience finality
she had had to create a continuum of her desire to experience finality; and a
continuum was only a continuum; and she knew this, yet could do nothing
about it but continue it, since cessation would mean uncertainty once more,
not finality; and she had forsworn uncertainty—as when someone says, "I
shall never speak to you again," she cannot go back on that. And so she must
not in any way be understood as backing out, but only as submitting herself to
a purification. And she went among her white people, who lived in that part
of Cosmania which is always on the verge of summer yet always in spring,
and who were to Miss Banquett a symbol of the economical side of her
beauty, by which she was sparing, and, because sparing, modest; and,
because modest, youthful; and, because youthful, selfishly prone to those
conventionalities of conduct by which one sometimes saves oneself a great
deal of abstract problemizing.
She went among them incognito, a shy woman among shy women, and they
did not know her. It was beginning of the Festival of Birds, which lasted
seven days. During this time, the population of this portion of Cosmania,
which was twelve, had to do with certain birds, which were called Birds of
Secrecy. And on the last day, at noon, the birds, the number of which was
twelve, laid each a clear, pale egg in the lap of each of these women, and
made a tiny hole therein with the tip of its beak, from which, in the evening,
after nursing it all afternoon, each woman sucked in the substance of the egg,
which affected her in no visible way, but seemed to make all things continue
as they were—their white skin to be white as ever, their green lawns to be
green as ever, their primroses faint and fresh as ever. And all was as from
youth, or, it might be hinted, shyness; or, it might be urged, economy—a
swallowing back of anything that quivered on the tip of their tongues; or, it
might be put, the not-saying of things not yet said. All of which was done in
the name of Miss Banquett, who was to them a mathematical symbol of
prosperity; she was their exemplary Thirteenth. And when they had sucked
the eggs all dry, they danced the shells into a fine dust and blew it upon one
another tenderly. And it made a clear pale down upon their cheek, a modest
blush that lasted them the year round, till the next Festival of Birds.
And Miss Banquett went among them incognito, and she was a thirteenth,
and they hated her. But they could not drive her away because she was Miss
Banquett, although they did not know it. And she was a blush more beautiful
than the others, which they held blasphemous, and for which they hated her
all the more. And so they persecuted her. They set her to combing them and
dressing them and sweeping their lawns and pampering their primroses, to
make their appearance and their surroundings in all respects as shyly
beautiful as possible. By reason of which Miss Banquett was obliged to
neglect the discretion of her own person; and by reason of which they called
her a bold wench; and by reason of which she was happy.
It was, as has been said, the beginning of the Festival of Birds when Miss
Banquett went among them. And they set her to care for the birds as well,
which previously had always been left to look after themselves. And she had
done this with a sweet diligence, watering them at a spring that she found
among the green lawns, and feeding them with worms that she found among
the primroses. Whereas previously they had been only ritualistic birds, they
now became pet birds. And they seemed to know Miss Banquett, and they
flew about her dotingly, and she was not a little pleased—although she
realized that this was strictly out of order and that something awful was
bound to happen.
What happened was that the birds, on the seventh day at noon, laid all their
eggs in Miss Banquett's lap. At which the twelve shy women were so
enraged that they all fell upon Miss Banquett at once, and the eggs were
crushed and spoiled. But Miss Banquett herself received no harm. For the
shy women, seeing what they had done and being afraid, began quarrelling
among themselves, as to which was responsible for breaking the eggs. And
by evening their white skins were red with age and anger, their green lawns
were blackened, their primroses were grown too full and stale, and
everything about them was of an ominous maturity, indiscretion and hysteria.
And Miss Banquett was alarmed.
"I must intervene," she said to herself, "or they will ruin me." And she knew
that her time among them was at an end. And she was very sad.
She determined that she must provoke them still more violently against her.
So she went to them and said boldly, "I am Miss Banquett." Which had the
desired effect: they then visited upon her the death of a blasphemous
impostor, sucking the breath out of her. And the birds devoured her obscure,
speechless remains, dotingly, since they were Birds of Secrecy.
When this was done the white women looked at one another with relief and
said: "The Unlucky One is now gone from among us." And they were twelve
once more, and shy once more, in the name of her who was to them a
mathematical symbol of prosperity, their exemplary Thirteenth.
As for Miss Banquett, she was delivered up again by these same birds at
their death, which was before the next dawn, and made one again, one out of
one, a figurehead. "For their sake as much as for my own," she comforted
herself, "for the sake of those who I so uniquely am. We must not be afraid of
the truth, however metaphysical it may seem. After all, one is not
metaphysical oneself."

The pleasure of Miss Banquett in her beauty had, until now, been sufficient to
her beauty. But now she wished to have both pleasure and content in it, to
have in it not only a being beautiful but a being as well. Her desire for
content and her desire for pleasure fanned each other into a single flame—a
flame which did not burn and which was yet fire—which she could not make
to burn because of her desire for content and which she could not yet put out
because of her desire for pleasure. And while she considered this flame there
sprang from it a whole woodlandful of fire-people, red-bright but quite cool
to touch.
"We are your fire-people, O Spark of Sparks," one called out to her.
"I know," she replied perfunctorily. And she walked among them, and each
of them was a fire-self, a burning vegetation. And when she came to the one
that had called out to her she said, "This is the most beautiful." And it seemed
to be nearly really burning, the sight of it both pleased and soothed her. "O
Bush of Bushes," she said, "how nearly really like home!"
"I know," it replied perfunctorily.
And Miss Banquett disappeared into the bush of bushes.
Within all was burnt bridges. She stood on an island, a just extinct volcano,
quite unharmed. All was quiet. "Are you there?" she asked hopefully. But she
was surprised to receive no answer. She felt half-sleepy, half-irritable. She
took a strong, high step forward, but remained stuck to the spot. She laughed.
"This is like an exciting adventure with nothing and nobody," she said. She
took another and another step. "Lovely, lovely me," she said experimentally.
"Spark of sparks," all around her echoed somewhat enthusiastically.
Miss Banquett now began to regain possession of herself. The cool lava
hardened. And from all sides appeared the fire- people in human form, a
little commonplace, all dressed in the latest fashion. But she did not despise
them.
"For," she said, "they represent that side of me by which I do not pursue my
beauty beyond the limits of reason. Not, of course, that I would sacrifice my
beauty to reason. But I am thoroughly acquainted with their nature and do not
deplore it. It was never my intention to do anything unreasonable, at least not
from my own point of view. Whatever is natural is reasonable. I would never
do anything that did not come naturally— though, on the other hand, I would
never be stopped by an artificial sense of shame."
And they surrounded her with respectful indifference and said, "Here we
are, Miss Banquett." To which Miss Banquett replied with polite
nonchalance, "Good afternoon." Whereupon a dapper young man, of a more
romantic disposition than the others, stepped out from among them and said,
"My name is Mr. Warm—Bush on my mother's side; and I understand you are
a Spark on both sides." "Quite so," replied Miss Banquett. "There are no
obstacles then?" "None," said Miss Banquett. At this the company applauded
as family parties applaud the announcement of a marriage—a little cynical, a
little proud that there should be a family event.
A stout, somewhat impudent-looking gentleman then came forward and took
charge.
"Principals," he called out, "in central depression. Relatives on craterial
ridge. Friends and casual acquaintances in crevices."
The ceremony was accomplished in a way not to move anyone deeply. Miss
Banquett fell into the spirit of her new surroundings.
"What a funny place!" she said.
"We are glad you like it," they replied tepidly. "Nothing ever happens
here."
"I hide myself away a great deal of the time," said Mr. Warm. "That is how
I preserve my vitality."
"This will be an excellent place to settle down in quietly," said Miss
Banquett to herself.
But Miss Banquett was wrong. For one thing, Mr. Warm spent most of his
time in hiding. This was worse than being entirely by herself. Then she was
alone. Now she was left alone. The presence of the general population
aggravated her loneliness; it would have been better if they had not been
there at all. For they were there and yet not there. They refused to commit
themselves one way or the other. They fidgeted and looked askance at
everything, without, however, seriously objecting to anything.
"I am thoroughly acquainted with their nature," she said, "and I do not
deplore it. But I cannot permanently abide it."
So for the time being she had a child. At the first opportunity it ran away.
When it returned, its mother said to it, "What have you been doing?" And it
answered, "I have eaten up everything. After I ate up everything, I met a man
who said that he was Mr. Warm." "And what did you do to him?" asked its
mother anxiously. "I put him in my mouth to swallow him," said the child,
"but when I swallowed there was nothing to swallow. And now…" "And
now?" asked Miss Banquett. "Now I am going to eat you up." And Miss
Banquett found herself inside an empty, abysmally warmish mouth. She was
shivering—as one does in hot underground caves. And so it was a relief to
be swallowed. "Why," she said, "what a pig I am!" For she had swallowed
herself. She felt herself solidly inside herself.
9

"Enough, then," said Miss Banquett. "I must not be ashamed to admit that I am
a thoroughly selfish character—in the best sense of the word. That is, I am a
thoroughly unselfish character: myself is enough for me. I have no wish to be
more than I am. I am thoroughly satisfied with what I am: beautiful. Anything
more would be—others.
"Enough, then," said Miss Banquett. "There can be no doubt. I have
populated Cosmania. I have not, perhaps, seen all of it, but I have seen
enough; enough to establish the death of the uncertainty of my beauty.
"Now, in the uncertain world of knowledge," she went on to herself, "they
who knew my beauty lived. Here, in the fearful world of self, they who
worship my beauty are dead, they are of me. But, though in them I have
experienced my beauty more certainly than by knowledge, I have not,
because of fear and power (the equal parts of desire) been my own beauty
more certainly than by the contradiction of uncertainty. I have prolonged the
death of uncertainty and so postponed certainty. I have not entered into the
state of those who are of me, who are dead—the faithful. I have cleverly
created a faithful order out of my beauty, but I have not yet myself been
simply and faithfully what I am."
And now the air filled with countless images of Miss Banquett, all like and
yet all different. And the likeness between them gradually faded. And the
differentness between them gradually took a single form; it became that
strange, so strange Miss Banquett who was to be so exclusively and so
inclusively herself. Then power left her, and fear, and desire. The world of
knowledge, in which she had had beautiful weakness, was gone; and now the
world of self, too, in which she had had beautiful strength, was gone; and
there was nothing left but a simplicity which was Miss Banquett and beauty
and nothing and nowhere. Her people, in whom she had addressed herself,
were gone also: they yielded the play to her, their parts all spoken. There
was no play; Miss Banquett was no more the play. What was Miss Banquett
now?
 Where was Miss Banquett—past address, past beautiful Miss Banquett
even, herself even? Not beautiful Miss Banquett! Leave her. She is not.
The ball divides: one half is the ball as large as ever, the other is Miss
Banquett, whole. And she is not. Nor is all this remarkable, since she is not.
Yet is this all? Only seven histories have been told. May the gap be satisfied
with more histories?
Too far ahead. Do not insist. Let her be not. Too long ago. Leave her. She is
sufficient to herself. She satisfies the gap.
For, by a will-less effort of will, she was alone—alone with alone. Nor is
this remarkable, since she was not. She remembers: what is Miss Banquett
now? Miss Banquett had undertaken this voyage because she was beautiful,
not for a holiday. Reported lost in shipwreck. Lost in shipwreck—she was
not! Nor was this remarkable. Beauty went on just the same: beautiful Miss
Who, number which, street what, place where. Beautiful Miss Who dines
privately to-night with a few knowing admirers. Remarkable: her well-
known face, their knowing faces—knowledge known, nervous wisdom. But
Miss Who is. And Miss Banquett is not.
First was beautiful Miss Banquett; then was the populating of Cosmania,
the populating of Cosmania by Miss Banquett with herself. Or, we might say,
Miss Banquett submitted her beauty to a psychological toilette. And Miss
Banquett and Cosmania are the same. And when, after the seventh history,
this is reaffirmed, the hypothesis having been illustrated with sufficient
energy to permit of its being drawn as a foregone conclusion, then Miss
Banquett's dear Cosmania is at an end. Miss Banquett has populated Miss
Banquett with Miss Banquett; Cosmania is at an end. Miss Banquett is at an
end. She was at an end—she was not, she was nothing. Her nothingness,
which her beauty now was, was such that she was not beautiful Miss
Banquett, she was she. She is not. And she does not suffer, she wants nothing.
She is nothing, she has nothing, she has herself.
Besides everything that there is to be known, there is nothing else to be
known. There is now not Miss Banquett to be known. Miss Banquett has been
shipwrecked on Miss Banquett. And the climate is perfect—not uncertain,
not merely certain, but perfect. Miss Banquett is at peace at last; she is not.
She no longer seeks records of her beauty or seeks to record her beauty.
Her beauty is perfectly recorded. She is not. She has fainted of her own
fainting beauty. She has carried herself off in a faint into finality and revived
herself to be not. Miss Banquett triumphs over Miss Banquett. She has
dispensed with Miss Banquett, yet she does not want.
 A drunken slut who in the world of knowledge scrubbed Miss Banquett's
front steps every Monday morning angrily rang Miss Banquett's bell one
Sunday morning. "I wish to scrub your steps now," she said. "I do not wish
my steps to be scrubbed now," replied Miss Banquett, "but I will pay you
now for to-morrow's work, if you need the money." "You beautiful little
bitch," said the slut angrily, "may you never want." And Miss Banquett never
wanted. She had economical desires, she went always only a little beyond
her means, beyond herself —so little that it was not by practical
measurement beyond herself. She went over no more beyond herself than was
necessary to discover what her means really were, what she really was.
Even now, when she is beyond herself beyond retrenchment, she has not
exceeded her means, she does not want. For she is not. She needs nothing to
get along on. Nor may you call her dead. She alone might say the word. But
she does not say, she is not. The seven histories, seven hundred, seven
thousand, more and more advance and more and more retreat, impossibly
toward conclusion, impossibly away from conclusion. For Miss Banquett is
the continuous end of a story to which there is no end, since she is not. How
did this come about? It did not come about. She is not. And since she is not,
she is her story's continuous end.
Poor not poor, alone not alone—Miss Banquett and Miss Banquett! You
cannot hear what she says to her. Like all people who live alone she talks to
herself. But do not spy on her. Or spy on her. You cannot hear what she says.
Or you can hear what she does not say.
You? You were a world. What is the name of your world? The name of your
world was You. It was not We: We is; You was of old. It is not I: I can only
be of new. You were a world, and Miss Banquett was not a character of
history, romance, philosophy, religion or science. She was not. You were
about to call her (you fringed gentians, you double red daisies and
dervishes), you were about to call her—a personality. Sweet perspiration!
Do you know what a personality is? A personality is a Jack-in-the-Box, that
is, a Jack-out-of-the-Box, that is, an empty box. And where is Jack? Jack is
everything. And where is Miss Banquett? Miss Banquett is nowhere. So
leave her alone where she is alone. She needs no celebration, no lamentation,
no rescue. She was not: she is not. So away with your cup of tea and away
with your saliva and your sympathy. She does not want.
Yet how to say good-bye? In Cosmania good-byes could not be said
because each peculiar appearance of Miss Banquett was as a coming as well
as a going. And now good-bye cannot be said because all her coming was a
going as well: she is already gone. First the world looked, then Miss
Banquett was beautiful. She was beautiful, then she showed. She showed,
then she saw. Now the world does not look, she is not beautiful. She is not
beautiful, she does not show. She does not show, she does not see. She does
not see, she is not. Or she sees that she is not.
In Cosmania she was the vision which was beautiful and which showed and
which she saw. But when she saw the vision which was beautiful and which
showed and which she saw, it abruptly and indecisively ended. And this she
noticed or did not notice. For not abruptly yet decisively she went on, she
saw yet did not see, she was not.
What is blindness, what is sight? Blindness is not seeing, sight is seeing.
But sight is also not seeing; you may not see and yet not be blind—or, at
least, Miss Banquett may. Miss Banquett sees and yet does not see. What do I
mean? I mean particularly Miss Banquett, or equally someone the same. If
you say God, this is right, but you are wrong. I mean particularly Miss
Banquett not Miss God. I mean particularly seeing yet not seeing: not to be
looked at, not to be beautiful, not to show, not to see—yet to see. I mean what
cannot be known before it is, and what cannot be known after it is because
then it is not, because then it alone knows. She alone knows. I mean
particularly Miss Banquett seeing and yet not seeing.
But whenever you may conceive this to have taken place, it is not then.
However you may plot her, she is otherwise. She is not anything you think.
She is not. She is beyond herself, beyond fear, beyond desire, beyond
finality, continuously beyond the continuum which was her experience of
finality and which was Cosmania. How did she do this? She did not do this.
She is not. No more may be said. And even this is false in whatever way you
may conceive it.
Is she then different? She is not different. She is not herself, yet she is not
another. The story of Miss Banquett is not of Miss Banquett, yet the story of
Miss Banquett is of no other than Miss Banquett. What, then, of the story?
What, then, of Miss Banquett? What, then, of fiction? What, then, of truth?
The only answer that may be given is that it is not possible to lie.
An island is all round an island. An island is all round the outside of an
island. From one side of an island across to the other side is from outside to
outside; but also from inside to outside; and also from outside to inside.
From one side of an island across to another is from inside to inside. An
island is all round the inside and outside of an island. And so with open; and
so with closed; and so with beautiful; and so with not beautiful; and so with
Miss Banquett; and so with Miss Banquett. That is, it is not possible to lie,
that is, only roundness is possible. Where, then, is the distinction? The
distinction is in the circle which it is possible to draw around roundness. The
distinction is in Miss Banquett. The distinction is Miss Banquett—or
someone equally the same. Though it is not possible to lie because of
roundness, it is possible because of roundness to draw a circle. It is possible
to lie. Miss Banquett is not yet is, is yet is not.

10
"Enough, then," said Miss Banquett.
"Are you quite sure," I asked, "that I have gone far enough?"
"Yes," she answered. "There is nothing more."
"It is the end of me," I said.
"But of me, also," she answered.
"But that is different," I said. "It is I who stop, not you. What afterwards for
me?"
"Afterwards as before. You shall go on where you left off."
"Where did I leave off?"
"Where I began," she said.
My cheek is cool; I am beautiful. My heart is warm; I am Miss Banquett. My
friends love me. My lovers adore me. I must choose among them, though I do
not wish to, since my beauty demands action. They are impudent, but this
pleases me, as a compliment to my beauty. I have chosen. My lover's uncles
visit me persistently. They delight in and envy my wit. My lover's sisters ape
me persistently. They delight in and envy my grace. I live in a splendid
house. The surroundings are charming. The people are not too intelligent. My
lover is a sensitive but retiring character. I should find peace here. I cannot
find peace here. My lover buries himself in the contemplation of my beauty
and is inaccessible. The people are not too intelligent. They are even more
inaccessible. Indeed, it is well so, because I can go away without disturbing
them. I do not wish to find peace. My beauty demands action. And they will
have the memory of me. It will make no difference to them. My cheek is
warm, my heart is cool. Am I beautiful Miss Banquett?
I am not Miss Banquett, I do not wish to find peace or not to find it. I am not
beautiful, I do not desire action. My beauty demands action, but I demand
nothing. Let my beauty do for itself. Let my beauty do for me, if it wishes. Let
it become me. I am undertaking this voyage for a holiday, not because I am
beautiful. Miss Banquett undertook this voyage because she was beautiful,
not for a holiday.
III: Nearly True Stories

THE STORY-PIG

ON the mantelpiece of Hotel Moon, where people went to behave nicely,

stood a large silver-plated pig with its mouth wide open. As no fire ever
burned in the fireplace, the pig kept shiny and did not need to be polished
more than once a month. When people were cold they put on their fur coats
and huddled round the fireplace, telling stories to one another. Fires were
never lit in the fireplace—not merely because people did not like to admit
that they sometimes felt quite wintry (homesick) even there, but also because
it was feared that the silver-plated pig might be offended if it were not the
president of the chimney-corner, with no spluttering, aggressive fire to share
in the honours. The pig was called the Story-pig because it was undoubtedly
responsible for all the story-telling. It held its mouth wide open and gorged
itself on the idle thoughts of the guests; and as they were all the pleasantest
possible thoughts, since people came to the hotel to behave nicely, they
turned to stories in the pig's shiny belly. The pig's belly was not shiny inside,
but no one saw or thought of the inside. There was, as a matter of fact, a large
slit in the pig's back to make it seem like a money-pig and make people feel
as if they were children when they sat around it. Often they dropped money
into the slit to show that they were not too dignified to live up to the spirit of
the chimney-corner, though they would do this awkwardly, always putting too
much in, forgetting that the inside of the pig's belly was not a grown-up bank,
with marble floors and gold lettering, but a dark iron belly that only Hans the
doorman had the key to.
Every evening, no matter how late, when there was nothing left to do but go
to bed, and it seemed too early to go to bed because they had not really done
anything to speak of all day long, they would sit around the Story-pig and tell
one another things to increase their self-respect—not exactly lies, but not
exactly the truth: things to make the world seem a nice place to live in,
perhaps nicer than it was, and themselves not quite so boorish as they might
seem, to be living in it so contentedly. And how full of interesting things the
world was—things that were not good enough to go to heaven along with
people, but that surely people would never forget even when they got to
heaven. Ah, all the dear, human ways and doings that could obviously not be
taken along to heaven. And yet one never entirely gave up hope of taking
them along; one never threw them away. Perhaps, when one was in heaven,
one would, at least, be allowed to come back to look at them now and again
— as at childhood toys. It would be a comfort, at any rate, to feel that one
knew that one had once been foolish.
Hans would stand at the door listening to their stories, going out sometimes
to look at the moon and coming in again when he heard them laughing. When
they laughed he would always laugh with them. And as when they laughed it
was generally because a story did not seem to have a definite point, so that
there was nothing to do but laugh and pretend to be interested (any one of
them was likely at some time to be the evening's dull boy), they were very
glad to have Hans by to slap on the back—thinking to themselves, "Now,
there's a fine dull boy for you." But when a story had a definite point, they
fell sober for a moment or so, looking at the pig and thinking of bed perhaps.
And Hans would watch them respectfully from the door, and they would say
to themselves, "Now, there's a regular dull boy for you, but he, too, must have
a pillow to lay his head on." And they would say good-night to Hans kindly,
giving him the right to feel as sleepy as themselves.
So in general they were self-respecting, fair-minded people who agreed
with the Go-cart that "Each one has his own particular value." When they had
gone up to their rooms Hans would turn some of the lights off for the night,
pat the Story- pig, perhaps empty its belly, and leave it to say to itself, "Now
we'll play at men and women, for that is always something." For the pig
would go on all night telling over to itself all the stories that it had heard,
fancying that it stepped gracefully this way or that like the lady who played a
pretty joke on the man who had ruined her mother's life, when, of course, it
sprawled as helplessly as ever on its stupid trotters—until the proud day
came along, and so impressed the pig, who was very easily influenced, that it
would grow silent and full of self-importance, thinking itself as wise as the
day seemed. "Mere children's prattle," the pig would be saying to itself as
Hans came in to turn out the lights that had been left burning (how foolish and
ill-tempered they felt, made to burn for absolutely nothing, not even for an
illness or a death).
Then little by little the guests would come prattling downstairs to breakfast
—so rich, so well-born, so good, and seeming ever so much more grown-up
than last night, as if they had only been teasing the Story-pig. This was the
time when they teased Hans, loitering outside the dining-room and making
him answer silly questions politely as he hurried to pat the easy chairs
smooth and make the chimney-corner a little orderly—Rose gave it its proper
cleaning at ten o'clock. Mere children's prattle that was, but on purpose, to
show that they did not have to worry, really, about making a good impression.
Certainly there was no danger of their taking one another for fools, and Hans
was too dull a boy to form an opinion. Then there was Rose, who went
around from table to table with a large basket of new flowers from which
they filled their table- vases according to their tastes—she would not dare to
form an opinion about anyone.
Such, more or less, was the change of heart that the Story-pig underwent
when the day came on—if a Story-pig may be said to have a heart. By night it
was a sentimentalist, by day it was a snob. If it may be said to have had a
heart at all, its heart was a lump in its throat—idle thoughts that by day lay
haughtily idle and by night melted into something like tears, and something
also like smiles (as all clever people fancy themselves to be sympathetic
people, too, as night comes on). The Story-pig was responsible for all the
story-telling, but it was also responsible for the way the guests behaved by
day—always nicely, no rudeness, no going deep into what anyone did or said
lest unpleasantness and discomfort should follow. By day, it cannot be
denied, they were no more than very, very amiable snobs. But by night their
eyes, the eyes of the universal soul which they all shared, opened ever so
little, the breadth of a money- slit, or a story-slit, we should say—just enough
to look indulgently at themselves from a long, long distance and forgive
themselves their vanities, as if it had all happened long, long ago.
By the side of the fireplace stood a tall basket into which people threw
things that they did not want for the moment. No one ever looked inside this
basket but Rose, for once people threw things into it they forgot all about
them, although at the time they would not mean to be throwing them away.
Rose would leave them there for a while out of respect (Rose was all
respect), sometimes quite a long while after their owners had gone away;
then, one by one she would hide them under her apron and carry them off to
the attic where she slept. Even here she would not feel them her own, but
pack them away in discarded pieces of luggage and never touch them again—
as a girl who is not going to be married for many years does not think of the
trousseau that she is gradually accumulating as her own, but the property of
the strange Mrs. Whoever that she is going to be. And would Rose ever
marry Hans, would the idea ever come into Hans's head, would she ever dare
let the idea come into her head? For more than anyone else in the world,
Rose respected Hans. More than anyone else in the world Hans loved Rose.
But not the Rose who more than anyone else in the world respected Hans.
Respect and love did not go very well together. Respect was only the
emotion of a hotel-maid, as self-respect was only the emotion of hotel guests.
Love was the emotion of a king, and to match it there would have to be a
change in Rose. She would have to have the emotion of a queen, something
just higher than the emotion of a king: she would have to feel "I am
beautiful".
But when Rose was asleep the things in the discarded pieces of luggage
were all hers. And the Sandman taught her how to speak smoothly and do her
hair the right way. Who was the Sandman but Hans himself giving her her
rights, and what was the sand but the shyness with which Hans behaved to
her by day thrown into her eyes by night to make her see herself as she really
was—the sand of love? At night she stepped into the beautiful picture that
hung over the Story-pig, and down the stream of her true self she floated, a
very invisible queen in a very visible ship, on her way toward the place
where she would be visible only to those who knew how to see her as a
queen and speak to her as a queen. Hans would not be much good at
speaking, but his eyes were in the right place. And that, after all, is the
important thing in love.
When the things in the discarded pieces of luggage became all hers—the
pretty slippers and fans and lace handkerchiefs and scarves and storybooks
and tobacco-pouches and playing- cards and toss-balls and family
photographs and travel curios— they became alive and very independent and
talkative, which is how things behave when they belong to a queen. When
they belong to ordinary people they must imitate the characters of their
owners and keep well within the circumscribed limits of their social
position; they must not even lose their heads at story-time or have feelings of
their own if, listening through the basket, they should hear someone say: "No
one would recognize the object of his deepest veneration if met with in a
dustbin." When things belong to a queen they must not only have their own
feelings and ideas, but they must express them freely; a real queen would
insist on not being imitated, and, further, on not being surrounded by ninnies.
But what unpleasant, critical creatures they became, so severe in their
opinions of everything but the Queen: she, of course, was no one to have an
opinion about, being the Queen. It was not a case, as when they were in the
basket, of sighing to themselves: Ah, yes, so things had happened, and could
they have happened any differently or any better, and how edifying, at any
rate, to have something happen! It was a case of making no compromises
whatever—why should anything happen if it was not in every respect good
sense? It was all very well to idealize the little match-girl and find pathos in
match-light visions; and to see the highest nobility in a little boy who was not
cruel to birds. But, fundamentally speaking, that was only half the reality, and
the silver half at that. It left out the golden half, that had to do with the real
visions and with real nobility, without twisting things round to seem
somewhat beautiful, considering the ugliness of life, and somewhat perfect,
considering what human nature was.
By day Hans saw the silver half—which ordinary people only saw by
night: they saw nothing at all by day but a finished picture with everything
left out that might upset their immediate happiness. There was the finished
picture, like the picture that hung over the Story-pig: a little of this and a little
of that seeming more than enough for one day—the finished picture, time, to-
day. And then there was the silver half, to-morrow, and the silver Queen—
always someone different. And then there was the golden half, for ever and
after, and the Golden Queen who was really both gold and silver, always full
of surprises but always the same person.
By night Hans saw the true mixture of the pathetic with the true. He saw the
beautiful; he became the Sandman; and Rose became the Queen, the gold and
silver Queen. And the things in the discarded pieces of luggage became their
true selves too. And what unpleasant, critical creatures they became indeed,
talking in no uncertain terms about the doings of human beings—mere mice
and dolls who got married and gave themselves splendid funerals, such
things as they themselves might have done if they had not belonged to the
Queen and understood the foolishness of pretending (for, of course, that was
all pretending, playing at love and death). The Queen herself did not criticize
the doings of human beings, she was too kind to criticize anything; she merely
looked the other way until it was all over. But they could not help seeing
how, although the clock ticked round always to the same hour, things
themselves were never the same again. They themselves only escaped
because they were quite old, quite dead. They belonged to the Queen and had
no illusions about to-morrow, when things were almost the same but never
quite—except the Queen, and she only because she went not from a beginning
to an end but from a beginning to a beginning.
When they lay in the basket it had been all very well to talk seriously
among themselves like children and call black grey and white grey and feel
that that was going far enough into the gloomy side of things. Now they must
call black black and white white, and what could be gloomier than that? And
yet they were not gloomy, because that was the truth, and one did not stop to
think whether the truth was gloomy or not when one belonged to the Queen.
They were absolutely right in their opinions, and there was nothing gloomy in
being right; just as thinking about death is gloomy, but there is nothing gloomy
in being dead. They saw things as they really were, and what could be more
satisfactory? When anyone among them—somebody's great-grandfather's
portrait, for instance—mumbled, "Now that is instructive," he really meant it,
and there was no need to say any more on the subject, such as "Ah, me!" or
"Oh, dear!"
Or when the prayer-book of somebody's grandmother, with a rose pressed
between its pages, said, "A dead person knows more than all the living
ones," they did not sigh like hypocrites, secretly happy to be alive; for they
were only alive in the sense that they belonged to the Queen and knew how to
express themselves well. They would think to themselves, "But we must not
be trapped into feeling ourselves alive, just because we talk in a somewhat
scattered way—though in the main we express ourselves well. We must not
allow ourselves to prize infirmities." The rose pressed between the pages of
the prayer-book, though it may have seemed the loveliest rose in the world,
was only a reminder that the real rose was their Queen, and that she was not
a flower at all, as her being a hotel-maid by day proved. It was all very well
to see a grain of truth in a flower because it was beautiful—or, rather,
seemed beautiful. But what about the whole truth, which flowers concealed
rather than revealed? From a grain of truth in a flower the most wonderful
tales took their beginning. But where did tales lead to?
Back to the tea-pot, back to the Story-pig: in fact, was anyone the wiser for a
tale, no matter how much better he might feel for acknowledging to himself
that things were not altogether what they seemed?
Things were not only not altogether what they seemed, but utterly different
from what they seemed—a thing they themselves would never have realized
if the Sandman had not changed Rose into the Queen, and if his twin-brother
Death, who worked along with him like a shadow, had not rapped them on
their heads and said, "Come now, no nonsense." In the basket they had talked
like children, and that was something, as confusion was better than logic,
which firmly said yes or no on no more authority than ill-temper. But here
they said, in no uncertain terms, so or so, and on the authority of good-
temper. Yes, they were good-tempered, although they might seem unpleasant
and critical creatures to people who did not understand in what a cheerful
state of mind they said all those unpleasant, critical things. Their being good-
tempered was due to their belonging to the Queen and not really caring what
happened, since all was over with them for ever and for ever and for ever
and after. They were dead, but they were also alive— exactly because they
were dead, having beheld the true rose that is not a flower at all, and because
who beholds this "shall never die".
They had seen the Queen; they were inside the picture; they were behind the
picture, on the reverse side, in another kind of to-day. And there were no
yesterdays to that to-day. All the other to-days were not merely long, long
ago; one could not credit them with having been at all, except in the minds of
the people who had lived in them and made finished pictures of them. These
pictures were only pictures of the real picture, which was not a picture at all,
but the real world itself; and here everything looked like what it really was,
not, as in everyday pictures, like what they seemed to people who kept their
eyes tight shut (the eyes of the universal soul in which they all shared), lest
what they saw should shock their vanity and make them turn pale in broad
daylight, before disappointment could set in becomingly, along with bed-time
stories and sleepy hopes for to-morrow.
But how they prattled on! But who knew better than they that the moment a
thing was said, no matter how true, it became prattle? And that was why the
Queen never said anything aloud, though she undoubtedly said to herself all
the things that they said—and a great deal more. They could not help saying
things aloud, for they only lived in for ever and after by the courtesy of the
Queen, who claimed them as hers (rescuing them from the dust-bin where
they belonged) only in merriment, as if to make the real world seem jokingly
like the human world—jokingly full of unnecessary things. They could not
help prattling on, but, on the other hand, they could not help talking sense.
And in merriment the Queen put on the pretty red slippers that someone had
tossed into the basket one night, having sent Hans for her day-shoes so that
she might walk in the moonlight before going to bed.
Such a pretty lady, and how she had flirted with Hans and enjoyed his not
being able to flirt back because, as she thought, he was only the doorman, but
actually, of course, because he had no eyes for anyone but the Queen. He was
the Queen's doorman. Not that she needed doors in her world. But she had
doors, so that Hans could open and close them; and this was not in
merriment, but for love. What Hans loved best, next to following behind her,
was running a little ahead of her sometimes to do something for her. And so
in her world she had doors, for love, since there was no vanity, curiosity or
ambition in Hans, only love. For in doing this he felt neither proud nor
humble, but only pleased to have an excuse for being in the real world, near
the Queen. And the Queen, who was not selfish, though she would have been
quite happy all by herself and could have got on quite well without anyone's
help, was only too glad to provide him with an excuse; and this, too, was
love.
And because the Queen did not like one-sided relationships, she became
Rose, the hotel-maid, by day, just to make things easy for Hans when he
changed from one world to the other; just to make the story truer. And so it
was Hans who had to change Rose into the Queen every night; and a very
difficult task it was, and an infallible test of his sincerity. For if he let any
other thought come between Rose and the Queen (such as a thought of the
pretty lady who first owned the pretty red slippers—and who can say but that
she left them behind on purpose, for Hans to remember her by), it would all
end in the Story-pig. Now, the Story-pig was not so bad in its way. It kept
Hans in pocket-money, so that at the end of the day he never fretted over
wants not worth fretting over—which prevents one from fretting properly
over wants worth fretting over. And once a month (at the full of the moon, as
it happened) how almost majestically it shone upon the chimney-corner,
having been rubbed hard that morning by Rose with chalk and spirit —a
frown on her forehead from saying to herself, "No, brighter than that, and
brighter than that."
But there was a limit to the powers of the Story-pig, as there was a limit to
the brightness that Rose could get out of it. The Story-pig could not, for all its
enthusiasm, get out of the human world into the real world. It skipped
resolutely round the edge of the human world, and, when the moon was at its
fullest, and its silver coat at its shiniest, it did indeed seem to be on the point
of skipping off, or it was on the point of skipping off—and could not. It either
could not or would not, which comes to the same thing: that it did not. For it
was, after all, only a Story-pig standing still on top of a world that moved
round and round over the same path of to-day-to-morrow-to- day, afraid to
let go of itself and skip off, though just before bedtime it asked itself the
question: "And what if I should skip off?" And the question was enough to
make it feel brave, as if it were a brave thing in itself to ask the question.
And the world (or the hotel-guests, who were surely all the world that
counted, being the nicest people in it) gave the question to the Story-pig. And
the Story-pig, its mouth wide open, made the question its own, with a skip
and a bound; though no one could guess this from the gruff expression on its
snout the next morning—as if to say, "No familiarities, if you please—if I
talked nonsense last night, that's my business."
The Queen (in merriment) put on the pretty red slippers and picked up a
walking-stick and went out into the moonlight—she did not pay attention to
the difference between slippers and shoes. Hans held open the door and then
ran ahead to open the gate into the road that led to the elfin hillock. What a
silly, frisky place it was, all whispers and wings! But she was walking out
for love, and it did not much matter where she went, so long as she gave
Hans something to do. The pretty red slippers and the walking-stick would
have a talk about it later. "What a silly, frisky place," they would say, "all
whispers and wings!" And this would be entirely their own idea, of course,
for the Queen would have made no comment, not she. The pretty red slippers
would grumble about the mud on their heels; not that there really was any
mud on them, for the Queen merely skimmed the ground when she walked,
but to emphasize the fact, in no uncertain terms, that the elfin hillock was no
more, no less, than a mud-heap in the human world, and only 'the elfin
hillock'—something here—by grace of the Queen's merriment. And the
walking-stick would be very sharp about the stones in the road. And as for
the wicked Prince who had tried to kiss the Queen—if she had asked him to
rap the Prince on the head! But she was perfectly right in taking no notice of
him, for it was plain that he was only made of moonlight. They had that much
at least to be grateful for, that everything in the human world that forced its
way into their world was changed into moonlight, nothing but moonlight—
except that madman the sun, who was changed into absolute dark. There was
no malice in the Queen's doing this; it was just something that could not be
avoided. But they couldn't help feeling pleased about it, and how right it
served him, for being so dogmatic. What fun when justice was poetic justice!
The elfin hillock had some use, after all, for that was where the things
which got into that world by mistake were buried— though they thought
themselves alive and never realized the difference. It was not the Queen's
policy to kill anyone outright: hers was the world of death, but not in that
sense of the word. In the elfin hillock, very happy, lived the happy snail
family which thought, in being such a happy family, that happiness was
everything. And here, too, lay clever Little Claus on his back, dreaming how
clever he was. And the brave tin soldier, thinking what a hero he had been,
and what higher virtue could there be than to suffer the worst humiliations for
a good cause without complaining—the good cause of being a hero. No, it
had never occurred to him to ask himself whether life did not lead elsewhere
than home again after an arduous adventure. So there in the elfin hillock he
lay, thinking how glad he was to be home again, and what a good name he
had made for himself to nail on the front door.
But not to tell all those stories over again, let us follow the Queen home in
the moonlight with Hans. And yet, walking home, Hans did not exactly
follow; we might almost say that he was walking practically beside her. One
rose-elf did actually follow her a good way back, but only to satisfy itself
whether it could not be of any use, with its tiny, cruel eye, for picking out evil
spirits in the absolute dark. But as the Queen walked straight into the
absolute dark and out again, without having even so much as a hair teased out
of place, what was the use (it mourned to itself) of all its intuition? Ah, the
good old days (it mourned to itself) when things were not so simple. And
back it flew to its hillock, where at least it could tell a lie, how it warned the
Queen just in time of a wicked witch lying in wait to cast a spell over her.
And what was left to them but to fall back on lies in a world that was not
kept together by good deeds? In the human world good deeds had been like
telling the truth, in this world good deeds were like lies. No, there were
neither good nor bad deeds here; there was nothing at all to do, if one wanted
to keep the enchantment, but tell lies.
But Hans did not complain of loss of enchantment as he walked along
practically beside the Queen. And she put her arm in his; and he took the
whole thing as a matter of course, not having any particular thoughts about it.
And what need was there to think—was it not all perfectly clear? She was
the Queen and he was—surely he must be a king if she was holding his arm?
But if he was a king, he was not a king a-courting of a queen. He did not love
her; when he loved her he was only Hans. That was enchantment, but this
was the truth. She was the Queen and he was a king, and they were the best
of friends. Her hand on his arm did not make him first hot, then cold, then all
a-quiver and not knowing where he was. He knew exactly where he was; and
there was nothing astonishing in his being there, because he understood it all
perfectly. It was absolutely necessary that there should be such a queen:
everything pointed towards her existence, no matter where. And here she
was, and there could be no magic in that, though there was undoubtedly
magic in his understanding it all—that is, in overcoming his natural stupidity.
But the magic in his understanding it all was his complete self-control: he
allowed himself no liberties. By always keeping before him his stupidity and
saying to himself, "No, I am too stupid, too hopelessly stupid, it is
impossible," here he was. He accepted the consequences calmly, that he was
the impossible one, to be thus walking beside her, not she. Had the magic
been that crafty meddling with the rules of the game that never succeeds but it
fails, then she would have been only the fierce, false Snow Queen of
intellectuality, and Rose would not have been the same as the Queen,
impossibly the same, but any fine girl— Gerda, for example. And Gerda
would have been half any fine girl, and half the terrible robber girl who did
not really care what happened to him, saying, "I should like to know whether
you deserve that one should run to the end of the world after you." And no, he
would not have deserved it.
No, there must be no craftiness about it, nor any witches except those who
conjured a little just for their own amusement, as the Queen did many things
just in merriment, to show that there was room for everything if done in the
right way at the right time and in the right place. No, he must always observe
the rules of the game: he must be either himself, Hans, or himself impossibly
a king. All else was mere quibbling, all else was the Story-pig, and standing
for one's own pea. Such was the nightingale's singing—taking advantage of
effects. No, if there was a change, it had to be an absolute change; not
romantic science, but verily to become as if the Queen.
In becoming as if the Queen, Hans became a king. It was not a case of you-
and-me as they walked back in the moonlight, arm in arm. It was all one, and
how calm; one heart—and the heart was the calm. Something was singing,
but not a nightingale. The moon was singing—singing the death of passions
and numbers: it was all one here. And the singing was like a loud quiet in the
ears; as the moonlight was like a bright blindness in the eyes, and as walking
beside the Queen was like a large loss of strength by which all was achieved
that strength could not achieve. For long ago, in the troublesome memory of
self, Hans had been, or had seemed to be, someone very strong, very brave,
very proud—a king who would not be king because he scorned his own
strength, so that he went off after each conquest to other conquests, hoping
against pride for defeat. By the death of this strength in long self-combat—the
death of the troublesome memory of self—he made himself Hans; and Hans
made him a king.
Hans, the doorman, ran ahead and opened the door for the Queen and the
king who had been walking beside her. They sank into the easy-chairs by the
fire-place like two hotel-guests who had gone for a long, long walk in the
moonlight and come back when everyone else had gone to bed. Hans locked
the door now, turned the lights down politely and went to bed himself, first
asking, "Is there anything I can do for you?" The pretty lady of the pretty red
slippers (for that was her name, whether she wore the pretty red slippers or
not) smiled no. That was the end of Hans—for the day. "Is there anything I
can do for you?" asked the king. The Queen, taking off the pretty red slippers
and throwing them in the basket as if her feet were tired after her long, long
walk (which they were not, of course), smiled yes, and the king, without
inquiring further, knew exactly what she meant. He got up and said "Boo!" to
the Story- pig (right into its snout); and away it skipped out of the window
and up to the moon and into it—at which the moon promptly set. And the
strangest part of it all is that when this had happened the Queen found herself
quite alone—the king had disappeared too.
And what a scandal there was the next morning, when Hans came down and
found last night's pretty lady curled up in her fur coat fast asleep, her
slipperless feet tucked under her.
"Madam, Madam," he said gently, "you are asleep." And she would not wake
up. She must have got herself very tired on her long, long walk. Her having
looked so hard at Hans as she went out of the door made him afraid to touch
her. And even when the other guests began coming down to breakfast and
some of them shook her—even then she did not wake up. So it all ended in
Hans having to carry her up to her room; and a doctor was sent for, who said
that she was only very tired and must be allowed to sleep it out. And then it
was discovered that the silver-plated pig was gone. And what with the
sleeping lady and Hans' blushes when he was questioned (though no one
accused anyone, of course), it was all very mysterious. And was Hans as
innocent as his blushes? And what of the picture over the missing pig? For it
had been found turned to the wall! And when it was turned back it was
unmistakably faded, as if someone had scrubbed it hard with soap and water
to wash away the surface and get through to a better picture underneath, and
failed, and turned it to the wall in disgust—that so beautiful picture of the
view from the hotel in moonlight, looking across the Valley of a Thousand
Turns towards the sea, which seemed to say "Slowly, slowly!" as it slowly
bore the visible ship to an invisible Somewhere. For whom was that picture
not good enough? It had been painted by one of the most famous artists in the
world, who had presented it to the hotel as the worthiest possible
compliment to its admiration for him—the hotel having presented him with
the worthiest possible compliment to his admiration for it, by refusing to let
him pay his bill, saying that the honour, etcetera. But beautiful incidents like
this were always happening at the hotel. . . .
And here the story breaks off, for things were never the same again. In
place of the Story-pig and the picture there now stood only a vase of fresh
roses—always fresh, but always fading. And people behaved as nicely as
ever; but it was not the same. They told no more stories to one another, but
sat talking of points of view and books and wars in far countries. Now and
then they might tell a joke, but this was only to keep themselves from tangled
bed-time musings—to remind themselves that sooner or later they must return
to their ordinary lives and a rigid economy of heart and purse. And Rose was
not the same, as if the pretty lady in going had left her, besides her pretty red
slippers, a flirting expression that there was no flirting back to, at least not by
Hans. Perhaps Rose would marry the chef, after all. And as for Hans—was
this Hans any more? so impolite and free with the guests, especially the lady-
guests, that the management was seriously considering whether it must not
dismiss him? And as for the Queen, and the king who walked beside her, and
what the Queen's shawl said to the sewing-case after the next walk in the
moonlight—do you not see, my dears, that the scene has shifted?

THE PLAYGROUND

TOMMY and Johnny were two very good little boys. Their way of being good
was to play all day long as if playing were the most serious thing in the
world. They learned this from their mother, who always said to them, "Good
children are busy children." Their mother's name was Julia, but they called
her 'Miss Advice' because she was always giving them advice and because
she always called them Mr. this or Mr. that, such as 'Mr. Making-a-noise', or
'Mr. Tearing-your socks', according to what they were doing. She was
always giving advice, and very good advice it was. So they called her 'Miss
Advice'.
Julia did not believe that children should have many toys. "It makes playing
come too easy," she would say. "Children ought to work hard to amuse
themselves." Another idea of hers was that by playing children gave pleasure
to someone that she called 'Unhappy Lady Thinking-hard'. Lady Thinking-
hard sat somewhere and thought very hard about everything that happened.
But if children were good and played without giving trouble, this made less
work for her to think about. She did not have to think about what was only
play if it did not make things happen, such as quarrels or things getting
broken or clothes getting torn.
Tommy complained to Julia one day that it was very difficult to play near
the house or anywhere where people might overlook. With other people
about things were bound to happen, he said. But as he and Johnny were only
little boys, they couldn't be allowed to go very far away from other people by
themselves. "If only we could have a playground at the other end of the
world," he said. Julia, their mother, said, "Well, I'll give you a piece of
advice: the next time I send you and Johnny out for a walk and tell you not to
go very far, not beyond the umbrella pine, suppose you disobey me and go
just a little beyond the umbrella pine, about twenty-four steps, and then turn
to the right, and then to the left again. And perhaps you'll find the very
playground you want." "Well, thank you, Miss Advice," said Tommy, "I think
I'll do as you say."
Now, it occurred to Julia, when Tommy made his complaint, that there was
a sort of playground just beyond the umbrella pine, to the right, and then to
the left again, and that it might be wise to break the rule like this about not
going beyond the umbrella pine, instead of having the children break it
themselves one day and get into real trouble. So off they went the next
morning to break the rule without being naughty. And Julia felt that she was a
very wise mother, and they felt that they were very wise children.
Julia knew exactly where the playground was, but she did not know exactly
what they found there, and they did not tell her. This was their secret. It was
not breaking any rule not to tell her. In the playground they found a rock as
big as an animal somewhat larger than a horse—lying down with its head on
its legs, as if thinking. They got on its back and pretended to ride away.
Johnny said, "Wouldn't it be fun if it really did get up and go?" Of course it
didn't get up and go, and they both knew that this was out of the question. But
something better happened—because they were working so hard to amuse
themselves. They had no sooner got off the animal's back than a voice near by
began speaking to them; they couldn't tell for a moment or so whether it was
the animal's voice or not.
"I am not what I seem to be," it said sadly. "My name is Lady Thinking-
hard. And as you are such hard-playing children, I thought you might like to
be friends. This is the other end of the world, and the animal you have been
riding is my imagination. I call it 'Sir Never-gets-lost' because it runs about
everywhere but always comes back, and whenever I call it, and no matter
how far away it may be." Tommy and Johnny now saw that they were not
listening to an animal somewhat larger than a horse, but to an unhappy-
looking though beautiful lady dressed in a silvery dress out of which silvery
pieces of money fell every time she moved. She sat in the curve of a twisted
tree—instead of walking about, as many people do when they are thinking
hard. But she crossed and uncrossed her knees, and shook her head a good
deal, and clasped and unclasped her hands. And at every movement she
made, some money fell out of her dress to the ground. Tommy and Johnny
picked it all up, without meaning to be rude.
"That's right," she said, trying to smile, "you can buy yourselves very nice
dreams with it. My friend Mr. Sleep is in that business. He is too lazy to think
and sells all his ideas as dreams. So I have to do all the thinking alone. And
as it's too much work for one person, some of my thoughts are always falling
out of me." Tommy and Johnny looked around and saw Mr. Sleep lying on the
ground behind Lady Thinking- hard's tree, in a cosy little hollow well-
protected from the sun and the wind. He was covered with a faded green silk
eiderdown that looked so like grass that Tommy and Johnny would never
have noticed him if he hadn't been specially pointed out to them. Tommy said
to Johnny, "Go over and wake him up." Tommy was a little afraid to do this,
but it was a rule of Julia's that Johnny must always obey Tommy, and Tommy
be responsible for what Johnny did. So Johnny went over to Mr. Sleep and
tugged at his eiderdown, thinking, "Well, Tommy will get the blame for this."
But Mr. Sleep would not wake up. "He never wakes up," said Lady
Thinking-hard. "He's always asleep and I'm always awake. It's very unfair.
But if you want to buy dreams from him, I'll tell you how to do it. You may as
well get something out of him. You're both good, serious, hard-playing
children, and it's little enough pleasure he gives anyone. What you must do is
to pinch him sharply on the ear. But be sure it's the right ear, or you'll only get
bad dreams. You pinch him on the ear and he groans and opens his mouth,
and then you put the money in his mouth, and he eats it up as if it were
chocolates. For he's always very hungry, as he never wakes up to eat."
Unhappy Lady Thinking-hard was not a great eater herself, but the tree in
which she sat was full of small, transparent berries, and from time to time
she reached for one of these absent-mindedly and put it into her mouth. "They
have no taste at all," she said, "but they are quite satisfying if you have no
appetite." Tommy tasted one, but it made him feel queer. "If I ate many of
these," he said to himself, "I'd soon lose all interest in food. And that would
not be good for my health." Indeed, Lady Thinking-hard said to him, "Don't
eat too many of them—they are rather mental." Julia called things 'mental'
when they were bad for the health.
Johnny was pleased at the idea of pinching Mr. Sleep's ear, because Tommy
frequently pinched him when he refused to obey him, and he was not allowed
to pinch back, but only to complain to Julia. And Julia would never give
Johnny satisfaction against Tommy if Tommy pinched Johnny for not doing
something that Tommy was right in telling Johnny to do. Johnny pinched Mr.
Sleep's right ear very hard—for fortunately Mr. Sleep was lying on his left
side, so that his right ear was free for pinching. Then Mr. Sleep groaned,
opening his mouth, and Tommy, who had taken charge of the money he and
Johnny had picked up, carefully stuffed it all into Mr. Sleep's mouth. Mr.
Sleep chewed it and swallowed it with great relish, but without waking up.
"And where are the dreams?" asked Tommy, waiting hopefully at Mr. Sleep's
side. "Oh," said Lady Thinking-hard, "you don't get those now. You have to
wait until late to-night when you're asleep. Or perhaps you won't even get
them to-night. But you'll get them some time. He's lazy, but honest." This
disappointed Tommy and Johnny, but they hid their disappointment because
they did not want Unhappy Lady Thinking-hard to think that they were more
interested in getting dreams than in talking to her. But of course she knew
what they were thinking; she knew everything. "Ah," she sighed, "you are
worrying about your dreams. People always prefer the things that come
easiest." This was very true, and Julia said the same thing. Dreams certainly
came easy. But after playing hard all day, weren't they entitled to dreams as a
reward? "Yes," answered Lady Thinking-hard, following Tommy's thoughts,
"you are entitled to a reward, and that is why I have given you a reward. But
you must not forget that I sit here for ever and for ever thinking, and I never
get a reward. I don't even get sympathy." "Poor Lady Thinking-hard," said
Tommy in his kindest voice. "But why do you do it?" He had no sooner said
this than he realized that this was a most unkind thing to say. He knew that
someone had to do the thinking, just as someone had to do the washing—and
there was always someone to do the washing, because it had to be done. He
might just as well have said to her, "Why don't you stop living?" And indeed
it was just as if he had said it, for at that moment she disappeared. And there
was the animal somewhat larger than a horse, which they had not noticed
while they were talking to her, as if it had been out in the world all that time.
And there they were riding it again, and its name was Sir Never-gets-lost—
and really it was time they were going home, Tommy decided.
"Why, you've been gone hours," said Julia to them when they reached home.
"I was beginning to think that you had got lost. You remember what I told you
about getting lost, Tommy? You sit down and try to pretend that nothing
unusual has happened, instead of thinking how strange everything is around
you, which only leads to crying. If you do what I say, you gradually find
yourself remembering the way home perfectly." "You know very well, Miss
Advice," Tommy answered haughtily, "that I never get lost." "Dear me, Sir
Never-gets-lost," said Julia, mocking him, "come and eat your supper."
Johnny began to say, "Why, that's the name …" when Tommy pinched him as
a hint that he mustn't tell. "If you tell her about it," Tommy whispered to
Johnny while they were eating, "she'll want to come along next time, and she
and Lady Thinking-hard will get to talking and agreeing about things, and
we'll be just children."
 When they were in bed and Julia had kissed them goodnight and gone out,
saying, "Mother advises you to go straight to sleep," which always put them
half to sleep, their father came in to tell them a story as usual, which always
finished the job. "Now put them to sleep, Tom, don't wake them up," their
mother said to their father as they crossed at the door, as she always said. But
there was no danger of this, as Tom's stories were mostly about people who
did foolish things and then were sorry; and their being sorry afterwards made
the foolish things they did seem sad rather than exciting. Julia knew that all
Tom's stories were like this. It was only a piece of advice.
But to-night they would have preferred telling Tom their story to hearing
his. Tommy had pinched Johnny to prevent his telling Julia anything, but
Father was different. Father would never go and talk to Lady Thinking-hard
himself—he was too shy. So little by little, Tommy beginning, they told him
about what had happened, making him promise not to tell Mother. He sat on
Johnny's bed thinking hard after he had heard it all, and Tommy, imitating
Julia's way of talking, called him 'Mr. Thinking-hard'.
That very night Tommy and Johnny, much to their surprise, got the dreams
that they had bought in the afternoon from Mr. Sleep. They knew that they
were those particular dreams because everything in them happened in the
new playground —their secret playground, not the one Julia had told them
about. In their dreams it was even more different from Julia's playground than
it had been that afternoon. Johnny found a shop inside a rock where real
people were sold for bits of string by a fat old woman very like Annie, the
madwoman, who hated people, especially if they were nice-looking. Johnny
had several bits of string in his pocket with which he bought six people, two
for one long pretty green and white string that had come off the box with
Julia's new brown coat in it. All the people he bought were nice-looking and
said how pleased they were to get out of the shop, which was crowded. He
bought a General in a bright blue suit who carried him on his shoulder and
said "Bang, bang!" every few steps. He bought a little girl and her
grandmother, and the grandmother seemed very young and playful, and the
little girl seemed very grownup and solemn. But they were a good pair, each
taking care of the other in a comradely way, as if they were soldiers. And as
they were both on good terms with the General, they made a happy party
together, like a party somewhere near a battlefield. There was nothing of
special interest about the other three people, except that they were nice-
looking. They came along with the others willingly and made the party a
success by being three more.
 The General set Johnny down on a table and said, "Now we must play
Wounded Soldier." One of the three extra people was the wounded soldier,
and another the doctor, and the third the enemy. The little girl and her
grandmother were supposed to cry, and Johnny and the General had to laugh,
while the doctor and the enemy fought over the wounded soldier, each trying
to catch him. If the enemy caught him he would get killed, and if the doctor
caught him he would get his leg cut off. And the little girl and her
grandmother really did cry, because the wounded soldier looked really
miserable as he ran between one and the other. And Johnny and the General
really did laugh, because they knew that it was only a game and because the
wounded soldier really did look funny. While they were laughing, up came
the fat old woman who had sold Johnny the people. She had got herself all
tangled up in her string, and Johnny left off laughing at the wounded soldier
to laugh at her. But there was Julia standing over him laughing at him, saying,
"Wake up, Mr. Tangle-string, you're all tied up in a thousand knots." Johnny
was almost annoyed with Julia because she almost always got things almost
exactly right, as right as one person could guess what was going on in another
person's head.
Tommy's dream was about Lady Thinking-hard. She didn't seem half so
unhappy as she had that afternoon. Indeed, she seemed extraordinarily happy.
It was very long ago. There was no world then, and so nothing to think about
but herself. There was only the playground, and she played about in it with
her horse, which in those days was a white pony, a real one. She was much
younger, too, a girl rather than a lady— not that she had seemed old that
afternoon, but oh, so tired. In the dream she couldn't find enough to do, she
was so lively and full of spirits. She kept riding round and round on her pony,
which was called Sir Never-goes-very-far—for there was nowhere to go
beyond the playground. She wore a pale blue dress with coloured figures on
it, each one a flower, very small. When she got off her pony to talk to Tommy
flowers fell out of her dress. They were real flowers, and Tommy made a
bouquet of them, thinking, "Mother likes anemones."
"Come and take a ride with me on my pony," said Lady Thinking-hard to
Tommy. And without waiting for an answer she whisked him up behind her,
and away they rode, Tommy being careful not to lose his bouquet. They rode
round and round, till Tommy could nearly see the wind, so fast did they ride.
Just when Tommy felt that he was going to fall off, from dizziness, Whoa!
they stopped. "This is Heaven," she said, as if it were a great joke to be in
Heaven. "Come and look at all the pictures." Tommy saw that they were still
in the playground, but that the playground had walls, and a roof, and a floor,
and that the walls were covered with pictures, and the roof, and the floor as
well. The pictures showed all the pleasant things that were going to happen
in the world. They were only pictures because there wasn't yet a world for
them to happen in. "And how is the world to be made?" Tommy asked.
"Sometimes I get into bad moods," she answered, "thinking of the horrid
things that would happen if there were a world for them to happen in. And
one day, in one of my bad moods, a world will begin to put itself together out
of the horrid things that I am thinking of. But the pleasant things will happen
too, so it won't be so bad. And in the end they will get the better of the horrid
things. But that will mean a long wait."
The idea of this long wait made her feel unhappy, so up she whisked
Tommy on to the pony again, so that he dropped his bouquet and had no time
to pick it up. Round and round again they went, till the playground was the
playground again. "And what is this?" Tommy asked when they had both got
off the pony. "This is only very early in the morning," she answered with a
teasing laugh. And as Tommy opened his eyes her pale blue dress faded into
the pale blue light coming from the window. There was Julia standing over
Johnny's bed. What a pity he had lost the bouquet! "No trying to remember
dreams now," Julia said. "Have you forgotten that we are going out to pick
amenomes?" "Now isn't that just like Mother!" Tommy said to himself. "It's
anemones, not amenomes," he said to her aloud. "Never correct other people
when you're not behaving perfectly yourself," she answered. "All right," he
cried, jumping out of bed quickly, "now say it properly." So she had to say it
properly.
Tom was clumsy at breakfast as usual and somehow managed to get some
of his coffee into Johnny's porridge. Johnny liked the taste, but Julia said it
was ridiculous, though she could not help laughing. "It's not fair to your
thoughts to try to help with breakfast and think at the same time," she said. "I
had a funny dream," Tom apologized. "I was in a rolling rocky place and
every rock looked like a large animal lying down or like something difficult
to understand. And a woman's voice kept saying, 'Yes, this is the place.' I
wanted to ask 'What place?' but was too frightened. So I only said, 'Thank
you very much!' every time she said, 'Yes, this is the place.' Finally she got
tired of saying it, I suppose, and said, 'Do you like it?' Not wanting to be
dishonest, I answered, 'I like what I see of it.' 'Oh, you'll remember much
more afterwards than you see now,' she said. And it's quite true that since I
woke I've been remembering a lot more about it than I noticed in my dream.
There was a post-box, for instance, with my name on it, only my name was
Mr. Thank-you-very-much instead of Tom. I looked for the key to it in my
pockets, as if I knew I must have it on me, and found it after a little search.
In the box was a picture-postcard for me from myself addressed to 'Mr.
Thank-you-very-much' and signed 'Mr. Thinking-hard.' It said: 'This is the
place. Do you like it?' "
Tommy had been afraid that Tom would give away his and Johnny's secret,
and was relieved when he stopped talking about his dream. At least he hadn't
described the other side of the postcard. Julia said, "Oh, you must have been
dreaming about the playground that I sent the children to this afternoon. It's a
very mysterious place—that's why I sent the children there, to get some
dreams. You must have caught one."

A FAIRY TALE FOR OLDER PEOPLE

FRANCES CAT was a long, black, sulky creature who did not like having
anything to do with other people. But to be in her own house surrounded by
everything necessary to her comfort was very different from finding herself in
the middle of a strange forest, not knowing how she had got into it and not
knowing how to get out. She did not, however, lose control of herself. For if
she got the least bit worried or excited she would surely begin to feel lonely,
and want someone to talk it all over with. And wanting people always
brought them. And she did not like having anything to do with other people,
because it meant remembering their names and their faces and their likes and
their dislikes, and being as nice to them as she expected them to be to her—
she would not, of course, want anyone to be anything but nice to her. She had
always preferred getting along without friends and being merely very, very
nice to herself. At home she never took any notice of other people. Somehow
—no matter how—every Saturday morning an envelope was slipped under
her door containing enough money for the week. When she went into a shop
she had only to say, "I want this and this," or "No, not that, thank you," when
they brought her the wrong thing, and to put out her hand with the money, and
to put it out again for the change. There was no need to take the slightest
notice of anyone. And now she was not going to go against her nature simply
because she happened to be in the middle of a strange forest, which she had
certainly not walked into with her own feet. It might easily happen that to-
morrow would find her back again in the life she had always led; and in that
case it would be silly to go back anything but the same long, black, sulky
creature that she had always been.
She stood in a large clearing over which arched branches hung and
intertwined, making a thick roof against light, wind and weather. And yet
there was enough light for Frances to see where she was, and a pleasant
breeze played about her face, and she distinctly felt that it must be a fine day
outside—no, it was distinctly a fine day inside. Where did it all come from?
"Never mind where it all comes from," she said to herself. "It must be time
for my nap." It didn't matter that she didn't know what time it was or perhaps
wasn't even sleepy. At home she would always say to herself, whenever she
felt that there was a danger of her getting too interested in anything, "It must
be time for my nap." So instead of investigating where the light and the
breeze and the fine day came from, she curled up and was asleep in a
moment.
She made it a very long nap indeed. Every time she felt herself waking Up
she would peep out of the corner of one eye and then out of the corner of the
other, to see if she was not really at home again, and it had not all been a
dream. But at last she could keep-her eyes shut no longer and was forced to
admit that, no it had not all been a dream. Furthermore, in this forest-room
there now seemed to be several things that had not been there before. At
least, she had not noticed them. Perhaps they had been there all the time, but
Frances Cat was not a sharp observer; she did not notice things unless there
was no way of not noticing them. For instance, it might be that she had
actually come into this strange forest on her own feet and had merely not
noticed what she was doing. But now there was no denying that there were
several things that had not been there before, or that she had not noticed
before. To be exact, there were four things. The first was a large white ball
which floated softly all around her without getting in her way and from which
the light by which she saw seemed to come, and also the breeze that played
about her face, from the continuous soft movement of the ball. The second
thing was a book that she found herself reading; and as for what the book
said, that is the real story. For by getting interested in what the book said,
Frances allowed herself to do a number of things that finally led to her death.
That is, she was changed into a Nothing. But before that a great many other
things happened. And then it will be necessary to explain what a Nothing is.
And then there is a story of how a Nothing becomes Something again. But
now there is still to tell what the third thing was, and the fourth. The third
thing was a fine golden dust which was clearly the cause of its seeming such
a fine day, and of the warm feeling that Frances had at first thought to mean
that it was a fine day outside. It must be understood that the large white ball
from which the light came was as cold as it was white, and that the breeze
that it made in floating softly all around her was nothing in itself, so that
some such fine golden dust was absolutely necessary to the comfort of
anyone who might find herself in this forest-room; and the object of the
Indescribable Witch who ruled over this forest was not to make anyone
uncomfortable. It was a dust like warm yellow snow, practically invisible, as
when you say, "It is a fine day," you don't mean that you actually see the
fineness.
Frances Cat now noticed that there was this fine golden dust in the air. She
couldn't help noticing, since she was feeling so completely good, so much
better than merely comfortable. But she didn't want to feel so completely
good. According to her way of thinking, if one allowed oneself to feel too
good one always expected things to match one's feelings, which of course
they never did; or at least one expected more than it was reasonable in the
circumstances to expect. And then there was always the disappointment. It
was better (she thought) to have just the one unexciting feeling all the time of
feeling merely comfortable than to feel first completely good and then
completely bad, which left one feeling nothing at all and saying to oneself
that one might as well be dead. And, of course, one never ought to talk like
that. Death was a subject that should be left alone—as long as possible. Yet
now she was feeling completely good in spite of every precaution she had
taken against letting this sudden change in her life make her feel different
from how she had always felt—neither completely good nor completely bad.
And she couldn't help noticing the golden dust that filled the air like a
perfume that one saw ever so faintly—rather than smelt through one's nose.
And she couldn't help noticing the book that she found herself reading, for she
had got really interested in it before she had realized that she was reading it.
And then it was too late not to notice it. And she couldn't help noticing the
large white ball from which the light by which she saw came, for it behaved
so very thoughtfully, rolling and bouncing all around her without causing her
any inconvenience whatever, touching her and yet not touching her, a bubble
white as ice and soft as Japan silk and bright as a little moon full of daylight.
How could she help noticing it, when it not only provided her with all the
light she could possibly want, but took special care not to get in her way—
not to be noticed? Here was a new kind of comfort indeed! This was more
than she had ever expected of comfort at home. She tried to feel that
something was wrong; but the more she tried to feel that something was
wrong, the more she could not help feeling that something was right. For the
first time in her life a smile appeared on her face. She did not know that she
was smiling, but she did know that she was feeling completely good.
Now, because she is called Frances Cat it must not be thought that she was
a cat. She was a long, black, sulky creature, and what more need be said? If
it is easier to think of a creature such as this as a cat, very well. On the other
hand, it is not precisely declared that she was a cat. It is only precisely
declared that her name was Frances Cat and that she had a cat-like nature.
And as the things that happened to her are not the kind of things that one
would ordinarily imagine happening to a cat, it is advisable to think of her as
a person; for there is no limit to what one can imagine happening to persons.
In any case, please believe that everything that is told of her is true. Think of
her in whatever way best fits in with your believing that the events described
actually happened.
Well, here was Frances feeling happy for the first time in her life and not
being able to prevent it. She was little by little letting herself go. For she had
a very playful side to her nature —otherwise she could not have let herself
go now. In fact, why she had been such a sulky creature all her life was that
she disapproved of other people's extreme seriousness. They were always
having ideas and going to do things or thinking over what they had done; and
it was all such a nuisance. So she had at the very beginning decided to be as
sulky as she could, since if she were playful people would only take her
seriously, comparing her playfulness with their own and tangling her up in
their tangles. But this was quite a different situation. And here we come to
the fourth thing. But she did not notice the fourth thing as she had noticed the
large white ball which gave the light, or the book in her hand which
interested her so powerfully that it was not until she wanted to go and look
for the Invisible Witch that she realized that she was reading a book at all; or
as she had noticed the fine golden dust which nearly tickled her face and
might have caused her constant irritation if it had not been so fine and so
completely good to feel everywhere about her—like a fine day. The fourth
thing was not there in a way to notice like any of the first three things. It was
the Indescribable Witch herself.
In order to understand how Frances became aware of the Indescribable
Witch, it will be necessary to follow the story in the book along with Frances
up to the point where she looked up and fully expected to see her—and did
not. And this is how the story ran: "There was once a long, black, sulky
creature called Frances Cat who was really not half so sulky as she seemed.
Underneath her sulky exterior she had a very happy nature." ("H'm," thought
Frances to herself.) "For a long time the Indescribable Witch had had her
eyes on her, for she ruled over the Forest of Transformation where people
were changed into their real selves from the selves that other people made of
them. Frances Cat was sulky only because other people made her so."
("Quite right," thought Frances, getting more and more interested in what she
was reading.) "And so one night, when Frances was fast asleep, the
Indescribable Witch carried her out of her comfortable bed and into the
Forest of Transformation, taking care that Frances should not, when she woke
up, feel any frightening difference between one place and the other, or yet fall
too readily under the spell of her new environment. She wanted Frances to
remember who she was while she was turning into her real self—indeed,
without her remembering, the change would be only a dream. The
Indescribable Witch had to be very careful about dreams in her work, since
in dreams people were not sincere. This was why she took care to carry off
Frances when she was not dreaming. Yet she had to be asleep when she was
carried off. Sleep is when people are tired of being their everyday selves,
and therefore the best time for changing a person into her real self—if she
has a real self.
"At first the Indescribable Witch covered up the more startling differences
between her forest and Frances's ordinary surroundings. At least, she tried to
make as few differences as possible in Frances's feelings. And this is why
Frances felt so gradually how very nice it was to be in the forest. Of course,
the forest was much nicer than it first seemed to Frances. But to feel all its
niceness at once would have made her dizzy with pleasure. She would have
danced herself into exhaustion, and so have had a reaction and had to go to
sleep; and that would have meant waking up in her own home again. It was
very important that Frances should not go to sleep again—"
("What, never?" thought Frances) "except for a few naps now and then—until
she got thoroughly used to her new surroundings.
"So here was Frances in the forest-room, with the coolest and smallest sun
imaginable giving her exactly the light she needed, her very own sun and no
one else's. And if she wanted it to be brighter or dimmer for some special
reason, she had only to say to it, 'A little brighter, please,' or 'A little dimmer,
please,' and a little brighter or a little dimmer it immediately became."
("H'm," thought Frances, looking up at it over her shoulder, "that's a very
useful thing to know.") "Then there was the weather. This was also all her
own. It was made of tiniest possible grains, and it, too, could be anything she
liked. But unless she said otherwise, it was a fine day—that is, the grains
were golden. And if she wanted to, she could turn them into money by
holding out her hand the way people hold out a hand for money, and with the
money that fell into it she could go for a walk and buy anything she liked."
("Now that puts a different colour on things," thought Frances. "I didn't want
to budge when I first found myself here, because I didn't have any money with
me. It's always unwise to go very far without money.")
"The Indescribable Witch, you see, did not want her to feel that she was in
a different world from the world she had been in, only that she was making
certain improvements in her life." ("Yes," agreed Frances, "I rather think I
have made certain improvements.") "For instance, if she got tired of the
weather being so completely fine, she had only to ask for whatever kind of
weather she fancied, and the weather-grains would turn into whatever kind of
weather she fancied. If she wanted a drink of water there was a glass in the
cupboard, and if she held it out in the weather for a moment it would rain just
where she held it out and fill up the glass without her getting drenched or the
weather turning entirely wet because of a drink of water." ("That was always
the trouble at home," she thought. "To fill up the well meant days of
inconvenience, for it had to rain not only to fill up my well, but everyone
else's. And then there was the drawing of the water and always splashing
oneself a little." Just for fun she tried to make it rain a little, and a drop fell
on her nose, which made her laugh and forget to stop the rain, so that she got
rather wet and also spotted her book. But she quickly remembered the fine
weather to be had for the asking, and said, "A good deal brighter, please," to
the sun, and went on giggling to herself as she and the book got dry. When
both were quite dry, she called, "A little dimmer, please"—this time without
laughing—and went on reading. For she was getting more and more used to
the new conditions. As for the cupboard mentioned in the book, it did not
occur to her to turn round and look for it. She quite rightly assumed that it
would be there should she have occasion to go to it. And this also shows
how natural everything was beginning to seem to her. Or another way of
saying it, is that she believed in the book because it exactly corresponded
with the facts. And another way of saying it is that she was beginning to
believe in herself, whereas in her previous life she had only preferred
herself to other people.)
"Now, just as Frances was beginning to feel that everything that was
happening to her was true," ("Yes," thought Frances as she read, "that is
exactly how I am beginning to feel") "it occurred to her that she had not yet
seen the Indescribable Witch who was doing all these nice things for her—
almost as if she had thought them out herself. "I must find the Indescribable
Witch," she said to herself. ("Yes, I must find the Indescribable Witch," she
said to herself. She seemed so near that Frances looked up, fully expecting to
see her—and did not.)
And now for the first time Frances realized that the story in the book was a
story taken out of her own head. And as soon as she realized this there was
no book, except that she knew that, if ever she failed to follow what was
happening to her, she had only to take the book out of her head again and sit
down to read. "But I really must find the Indescribable Witch," she said. If
she could only imagine what she was like, she would certainly see her, she
felt. Indeed, it was as if the Indescribable Witch was saying to her, "Look
hard, see me!" and she could not, simply because she was too lazy. "Yes,"
said Frances, "I must begin to be less lazy." With that she started dancing
very earnestly, and soon dozens of pearly tambourines with silver jingles
were flying round her like dancing plates. And she rapped her knuckles
against this one and that one as they flew by, making a music like a playing on
water if water had different notes when one struck it; for each of the
tambourines had a different thin, pearly note when she rapped against it, and
the jingles rippled like water at each note.
"Why, why," she cried, "it's no work at all not to be lazy! And yes, yes, I am
now beginning to be my real self. All that I meant by being a long, black,
sulky creature was that I wanted to have a good time, while the people
around me were all trying to be Somebody this and Somebody that, and the
only good time they knew was to be thought well of by one another. Well, at
last I have got rid of them." Then she whirled round faster than ever, and the
tambourines hummed like sea-shells. "Go out, go out," Frances cried to the
little sun. Then the tambourines made a curly rainbow as they flew round her
and the fine weather-grains twinkled everywhere like stars all but out of
sight. And Frances wound round and round herself and did the most difficult
dance-steps with such remarkable grace that she could not help admiring
herself. It was an almost unthinkable pleasure to be free to admire oneself
without being called vain by other people. On she danced in the twinkling
dark. And the tambourines hummed louder and louder, so that when she
rapped her knuckles against them a definite splashing and twisting of waves
could be heard. And the jingles now seemed to scatter a sweet, ticklish spray
over her.
But as she was thinking more about herself than what was going on around
her, she hadn't noticed that the scene was changing. She was just saying to
herself, "I must be a very different person to look at from the long, black,
sulky creature I was"—when suddenly she realized that she was floating on
water and that the weather-grains had become a starry sky above her. But she
was not in the least upset: she felt perfectly safe. And she was safe; for she
was lying in a boat made of— well, anyway she felt quite safe and was quite
dry, which was all that mattered for the moment. And when she thought about
home and getting home, it was her forest-room she thought about, and that
seemed very near, so near that she had only to think about it to be back in it.
So she floated serenely along with her question: how long was it since she
had been a long, black, sulky creature called Frances Cat? Then it dawned
upon her that she had never really been a long, black, sulky creature called
Frances Cat. And while it was dawning on her, sure enough, it began to grow
light and her boat ran gently against land. So she stepped on to the shore, and
when she looked back to the water again it was gone, and the boat as well,
and she was back in her forest-room again. "Oh," she said, "this must be
nearly to-morrow," which made her feel a little sleepy. And she lay down
without taking the trouble to notice if there was anything to lie down on, and
was soon, as she thought, fast asleep.
But she was not fast asleep at all. Her eyes were closed and she was saying
to herself how lovely it was to do whatever she felt like doing and to feel
like doing such lovely things. If she wanted to lie down on a low couch made
of crisp, flowery leaves and close her eyes for a few minutes and give free
rein to her most private feelings, she could do all this without any danger of
unpleasant consequences. And if she felt like going to sleep—but she did not
feel like going to sleep. She did not want to lose a single moment of this life.
No, she was not the same creature at all as she had been, she thought. The
same self, yes; but she was certainly not Frances Cat any more. Fancy having
slept herself away as she had in the old days! But no, it wasn't herself that
she had slept away, but them. For here she was, and there was quite a lot of
her. Why, there was more and more of her every moment. "Yes," she said to
herself, "I really must see what I look like now. I could never bear the idea of
looking at myself then, because it reminded me that other people could also
look at me and form whatever opinion they pleased."
So she got up to go to the mirror. But there was no mirror. There was only a
table laid for one, and a chair drawn up to it, and the cupboard that had been
mentioned in the book, and, what she couldn't help being surprised at, two
actual windows—one on her left and the other on her right. But she would
not allow herself to be surprised. "After all," she said to herself, "those are
my windows, why should I be surprised at them?" And she sat down to eat
her breakfast in the most serene manner in the world—no, in her world. Yes,
it was her world, she thought as she lifted a spoonful of she-did-not- know-
what to her lips. Then it occurred to her that she had no appetite for eating.
Having an appetite was like conversing with a few chosen, boring people
who you were sure would not disagree with you and make you any more ill
than you were.
"But I am not ill," she said, putting down her food without having touched
it, "and what's more, let anyone dare to disagree with me in my own world!"
At this the plate and the spoon and the table and the chair disappeared with a
frightened clatter. Then she strutted to the left window and looked out in a
possessive way on her sun and her fine weather, which she had apparently
put out of doors (she decided) for convenience—one couldn't always be
having them about; in a world of one's own one had many things to think of
besides the weather. Then she strutted to the right window and looked out.
But there it was neither light nor dark, nor was there anything like weather to
be seen. She looked and looked, and the harder she looked the more
convinced she became that out of the right window there was nothing to see.
This made her feel a little nervous. "Oh, dear," she said to herself, "I
wonder if I am going mad." "No," she answered herself, "I am not going mad.
People only go mad when they disregard the facts. Now I have only to study
the facts a little more closely, and I shall discover what it is that I have been
disregarding." And no sooner had she said this than she found herself sitting
reading the book which she had been previously reading; only this time she
sat at a writing-desk, with pen, ink and paper neatly arranged in the partitions
—in case she should want to write anything down.
"I understand very well now what was wrong," she said, as soon as she had
the book before her. "I was going too fast for my intelligence. For when I was
Frances Cat I always made a point of knowing as little as possible about the
world I lived in, and my intelligence got into bad habits. But this is a
different world altogether, and it won't hurt me to know more about it, since
it is, after all, my own world. Knowledge in that world merely meant
learning about other people, and how to please them, and so it was necessary
to know as little as possible if one wanted to avoid ruining one's life for
other people. For once you knew how to please them it was difficult not to
please them, knowledge being a thing that cannot resist showing itself off.
Well, I must begin to think more and be less selfish. It won't hurt me to be
unselfish, because I am entirely by myself here."
But being now in such a reasonable mood, she remembered that she was not
entirely alone here: she had forgotten all about the Indescribable Witch! She
remembered how from wondering what the Indescribable Witch was like she
had slipped into wondering what she herself must be like, and so on. She
really must behave better, she told herself—not because she was afraid of the
Indescribable Witch, but because the Indescribable Witch had been so very
kind to her. She did not want to hurt her feelings. A small mirror lying face
downwards on the top of the writing-desk caught her eye, but she had
suddenly lost all curiosity about herself. She wanted to know about the
Indescribable Witch. Yes, she who had been lazy, stupid Frances Cat was
now sitting down with a large, serious book in front of her, impatient to
learn. Before, when she had read out of it, it had seemed a moderate-sized
book, no bigger than a novel. Now it was not only one large, serious book; it
was three large, serious books. The other two stood on a shelf over the
writing-desk, each with its appropriate title. The title of the book in front of
her was, as might be expected, The Indescribable Witch, Volume I.
So Frances, or whatever her name was now, began to study her lesson. But
she was surprised to find that instead of having a lot to learn she had a lot of
questions to answer. "This must be what the pen, ink and paper are for," she
said. And she explained to herself that this was the right way to study,
because one couldn't expect studying to be as easy as reading, which merely
meant turning over from one page to the next. But they were not so much
questions about her ideas or opinions of the Indescribable Witch as, at any
rate to begin with, questions about herself. It is not necessary to go over
everything she wrote in reply to the questions she set herself to answer; it
will be enough for our story to say that she answered all the questions as
truthfully and thoughtfully as she could, and that when she had finished she
sewed the pages together with a long, stout needle and some leathery thread
which she found in a basket on top of the writing-desk. In one of the drawers
of the writing-desk (where there were two little drawers instead of a
partition) she also found a piece of soft goatskin just the right size, when it
was unrolled, to make a cover for her book like the covers of the other three
books on the shelf. And in one of the partitions she found two stiff pieces of
cardboard, and in another a pot of glue. And she glued the first page of her
book, which was naturally blank, as a first page should be, on to one of the
boards, and the last page, which was also blank, as a last page should be, on
to the other of the boards. And then she glued the soft goat-skin round the
boards, turning the edges neatly inside.
And there was her book, except for the title. But that meant printing out her
own name, and she did not know what her name was now. She was Frances
Cat, in a way; that is, she was what Frances Cat was turning into. To avoid
making a mistake, she called it The Indescribable Witch, Volume X. This left
six volumes between the three books that she had found on the shelf, and her
own; and 6 was her lucky number. She knew that it was her lucky number
because she always thought of herself as just six years old—an age when
people stopped treating you like a child and before they began thinking of you
as one of themselves.
Having done this she felt extremely pleased with herself. As for the book
about the Indescribable Witch, it had apparently disappeared page by page as
fast as she had written her own book. As for the other two books on the shelf,
she now took them down in turn to study. And for each of them she made an
answering book, so that all three of the original books were now gone; and in
their place stood three books of Frances' own writing, called respectively,
The Indescribable Witch, Volume X, The Indescribable Witch, Volume IX,
The Indescribable Witch, Volume VIII. But what about the other seven
volumes? She did not like the number 7: it was other people's lucky number.
And the paper was all used up, and the inkpot dry, and there was no more
leathery thread, and there had been only three pieces of soft goatskin just the
right size, and no more. Besides, her head was turning round and round in the
wrong direction, from thinking numbers backwards—ten, nine, eight, seven,
six, five, four, three, two, one, none. That came of tracing things back too
carefully. It wasn't at all necessary to be so careful. She was perfectly sure
that everything was quite perfect.
She got up from the writing-desk almost disdainfully. In fact, there was no
writing-desk. There were no books. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four,
three, two, one, none. It had been, more or less, her fussiness about details.
Well, she was fussy. There was a hole in her stocking, under the knee. She
must mend it. She slipped her hand under the elastic that held her stocking up,
and under the stocking, and mended. It was a black cotton stocking, but she
was mending it with pale blue silk—the silk must have come out of the
basket that had stood on the writing-desk. Well, she wasn't as fussy as all
that; blue was a nice colour. The mirror that had been lying face downwards
on the top of the writing-desk had had a blue, silver- blue, back. The needle
was also silver-blue. It went in and out, as if it were several needles. Her
eyes were sparkling before her in silver-blue rays. It was really a mirror that
she was looking into, and what a pretty little girl she was, no more than six
years old, and so grown-up-looking. And the mirror was not a hand-mirror
lying face downwards on top of the writing-desk, but more like a mirror
hanging up, the silver-blue back coming over the edge and mixing in with the
glass the way that the frames of mirrors always mix themselves in with the
glass —only this frame seemed to pour out of the glass as well as into it.
 In fact, a great deal of silver-blue light was coming in from the window on
the right and, so to speak, feeding the mirror, which in turn gave it all out
again—to the frame, to her. Yes, just such a steady glittering was going on as
always happens when thoughts begin to clear and soon one will find oneself
understanding a great deal. And, as always happens when thoughts begin to
clear, the glittering seemed something apart from her mind. One cannot help
being a little stupid when one is on the point of understanding; one is
naturally afraid of understanding too much and getting tired. It is not very
serious if one's body gets tired—this is what bodies are for. But Frances Cat
(or whatever her name was now) knew that it was dangerous to tire one's
mind. This was why, even when her thoughts began to clear, she kept them in
a glittering daze until she was quite sure that she wasn't presuming on her
intelligence. No, it does not do to tire one's mind. For by the time one comes
to understand a great deal, there is very little left of oneself besides one's
mind, and it is not very interesting to be merely a tired mind.
The frame seemed to move into the mirror and take the shape of her own
reflection there, and then out again and take the shape of a door, and then still
further in again and take the shape of a keyhole. And through the keyhole she
could almost see what was on the other side. At any rate, she could see a
distance which must be really quite close, because she saw it through a
keyhole.
On the other side of keyholes, she knew, there were always secrets which
ceased to be secrets as soon as one was on the other side oneself. The
secrets on the other side of this keyhole were only, indeed, certain
experiences that she needed to have before she entirely understood the nature
of her present life. They seemed distant, if looked at through the keyhole, but
once she had had them it would be the time before she had had them that
would seem distant. What she saw through the keyhole was her own
inexperience, as if she were looking back into herself from later.
In sitting down at the writing-desk she had turned herself into a little girl,
by the way she went about it—like someone at school. And with each book
she grew a little older, not so much in years as in self-possession—like any
schoolgirl. She was a little girl in an extraordinary position, and she had to
be careful not to tire her mind by thinking things out too carefully. She
walked round the room briskly to refresh herself. Stopping to look out of the
window on the right, she now thought she saw a narrow street full of shops in
the distance, where the silver-blue light went into perspective, and decided
that she felt sure enough of her head to go out for a bit and buy a few things,
just for the exercise. "I mustn't let myself get stale—this is apt to happen to
students," she said to herself. So she had to think about money. Where was
her purse? A purse was always in a drawer, and she found one in a drawer in
the writing-desk—somewhere in the writing-desk, which by now had
practically disappeared and was more like an upstairs room than a writing-
desk. The purse was empty, but she had only to hold it out in the weather to
fill it. This meant going to the other window. She held her purse out without
looking, and with rather a toss of her head, as much as to say that she didn't
care whether the purse was filled or not.
Of course, it came back filled, which was what she wanted, but she did not
like the business at all. She did not want to feel beholden to mysteries. But
never mind (she said, with another toss of her head), she would go for her
walk. She took down a cape from a peg near the mirror which was also her
door, and her keyhole, and, for that matter, her entire future, or, at least, all
the time she had to waste; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it
stood for to-day. As for its being a mirror, there was no more need to think of
it like that, since she knew very well what she looked like: a pretty little girl
with a thoughtful face and silver-blue eyes and hair like a very natural-
looking doll's. So out she went.
For some time as she walked on she thought a great deal about the
Indescribable Witch and her not being able to learn anything about her. "She
obviously does not want me to think about her, but rather about myself. Now,
what is the shortest possible way of thinking about oneself? I don't want to go
on thinking about myself for ever, but only long enough to settle everything,
and then to be—well, to be nothing, that is, no trouble at all to myself. I
suppose it means deciding what I really want to do. That's easy to say. I want
to enjoy myself and be quite free of responsibility and the opinions of other
people. The problem is, how not to be serious like other people and yet how
not to be silly. It was rather silly, my dancing about like that—wasn't it just
last night? Not exactly silly, because nobody was watching me and I really
had to let myself go just once to show that I wasn't such a sulky creature after
all. But I couldn't go on dancing about like that for always. There must be
quieter ways of enjoying oneself."
Perhaps it is not entirely clear what Frances was trying to do with herself?
Why, of course, she was patterning herself on the Indescribable Witch, since
that was the only way she could think about herself and the Indescribable
Witch at the same time. For, however earnestly she may have meant to devote
herself to thinking about the Indescribable Witch, she could never really have
got herself out of her head. No one could who really had a self, and the
Indescribable Witch was well aware of this, and would not have allowed
Frances to forget herself (her real self) for a moment. This is why the books
about the Indescribable Witch had turned into books about herself. Moreover,
it must be understood that the Indescribable Witch was not to be known of or
thought about in any of the usual ways in which people are known of or
thought about. What had made it seem to Frances that she had forgotten about
the Indescribable Witch was not that she had, in dancing about like that, lost
some definite idea of her she had got at the beginning—since it was not
possible at any time to have a very definite idea of the Indescribable Witch;
the point was that in dancing about like that Frances had almost forgotten
about herself. Yet some such foolishness had been necessary, as a means of
forgetting about Frances Cat. Yes, it had been a very critical moment indeed.
For in it she had had to forget about Frances Cat without forgetting about
herself; not to forget altogether what Frances Cat was like, but to think of her
as a thing of the past, that she could never again go back to be. Some people
would call this remembering, not forgetting; but it is all very much the same
thing.
And here she was walking calmly on by herself—behaving almost as if she
were the Indescribable Witch herself. But as she was only a little girl in a
cape, with a purse full of money in her pocket, she felt no more than that she
was quite able to look after herself—not that she meant to be self-willed (or
cat-headed, as her father would have said), even though as a competent little
girl this might have been forgiven her. And looking round her as she walked
on, she noticed on her left a field full of nibbling goats, and stopped to have a
conversation with the man who was tending them—tightening the hobbles of
some, loosening those of others, and being as gentle as he knew how with
them, because, as he explained, goats were very sensitive animals. "Of
course, everyone who tends animals thinks his kind of animal is more
sensitive than any other kind," said Frances in an experienced but not rude
tone. "My own father, who knew a great deal about goats, used to say, 'It's a
queer thing is a goat!' But tell me, what isn't a queer thing!" And to this the
old man—and he wasn't such an old man at that, but rather a long-ago man—
said, "Yes, what isn't a queer thing?" And as he said it he looked at her in the
queerest way, and all of a sudden the man and the goats and the field went
out like a light.
What possibly could have put them into her head in the first place? It must
have been, to begin with, the goatskin with which she bound the books.
Probably it hadn't been goatskin at all, but just something to bind books with.
Why had she called it goatskin? Oh, because that was the way people talked
about things—there always had to be a special name for everything, whether
it deserved a name or not. But she was done with adjusting herself to the
peculiarities of other people. Other people now had to adjust themselves to
her, nor would she admit that she had peculiarities. She was, on the contrary,
the most reasonable kind of being that anyone could be, and exactly because
she had made up her mind, after a long period of irritation with the
peculiarities of other people, to go her own way, though everyone else was
going nowhere at all—just imagining, in fact, peculiar ways to go without
daring to go them. And this was how there came to be so many names, more
names than things—by imagination. And names were bound to grow old-
fashioned, because so many of the things with names didn't really exist; and
that was a very old- fashioned world. Yes, and very old-fashioned behaviour
on her part, to have an entertaining conversation with an old goatherd. And
was it really entertaining? No, it was not. She was going her own way, and
alone, and that was pleasure enough.
But how had the old goatherd come into the story? Why, that old goatherd
was her father! But it must have been a long time ago when she had had a
father. She supposed (going over everything as she walked on) it was being a
little girl that had put that into her head. Thinking about fathers was another
old-fashioned habit. But, after all, there was something bookish and quaint
about being a little girl, even though she meant it only in a humorous way.
Being a little girl was just a protection against thinking too hard. She had not,
at any rate, thought about mothers! Mothers was the most old-fashioned idea.
Fathers were at least more up to date than mothers; they always seemed so
much younger than mothers, almost as young as oneself. And yet, how very
long ago her own father seemed! Fathers were, of course, other people just
like anyone else, even more so, because you expected them not to be like
other people, and they really were. They were as much like other people as
you were when you put on airs and behaved like other people. Yes, fathers
certainly put on airs. She remembered that this was why she had quarrelled
with her father long, long ago, when she was a little girl, and had left home to
go and live by herself. Her father had put on airs, and she had put on airs
back to him, and so they had fallen out, and she had gone to live with an aunt
who had quarrelled with her father long before that—a silent haughty aunt
who had made a great pet of her. And then her aunt had died. At any rate she
remembered coming back one day from a walk and not finding her; but things
had gone on very much the same as before.
It occurred to her that she was still a little girl, as she had been, and why?
But she wasn't really a little girl now. She was merely protecting herself—
against herself. Then she had been a little girl to protect herself against other
people. There was a difference between tiredness caused by other people,
and tiredness caused by oneself. Was the tiredness caused by oneself really
tiring? Certainly not—because one didn't really let oneself tire oneself; it
was impossible to be unkind to oneself. Was she really a little girl now?
Certainly not. Just let anyone show her the least disrespect! And at this very
moment she found herself in the street full of shops that she had seen out of
the window on the right in the distance. No, indeed, she was no longer a little
girl but a most grown-up and a most grand lady, talking to a tall man in a
flowery waistcoat and spangled coat about—about herself. "I trust you are
quite well now?" he was saying ever so respectfully. And "Oh, that was
nothing," she was answering (ever so graciously, since there was really no
danger of anyone's treating her disrespectfully), "I was merely busy with my
thoughts!" And then she went from shop to shop choosing the grandest clothes
she could find. Nor were they shops in which one bought things. One merely
chose them, as if one had more than one could do with at home; which got
very nicely round the difficulty of her having lost her purse. The very
grandest people never bought things; they merely looked and handled and
thought how much finer their own things were.
And then she came round to the last shop, which stood on the opposite side
of the street from the first, facing it. It was a shop full of jewels—not like an
ordinary jeweller's, where everything lay by itself in green plush, but more
like a greengrocer's shop, with one thing on top of the other. And here, it
seemed, one was really expected to take things along with one, like fruit that
wouldn't keep. The whole family surrounded her as if she were some
wonderful relative of theirs; and all the children—and as dirty as
greengrocer children they were— tugged at her crackling brocaded skirt,
which got a little dirty as she swept round the shop saying the pleasantest
things that she could think of to everyone. For besides the children there was
the younger daughter, who had been named after her and who seemed so ill
that it was surprising that she should be alive; and the elder daughter, who
clearly disliked her; and the mother, who did nothing but cry all the time she
was there and make up a bouquet for her to take away; and the father, who
treated her not so much as a wonderful relative but rather as if she were a
stingy, wealthy relative who might be tricked into buying this or this or this
as a bargain. She tried not to mind—what had she to fear?—but she could not
help growing disgusted with them, and with the other shops as well. Yes, they
had all been flattering her, and flattery was disgusting. It was disgusting
because one never got it unless one wanted it; she must have wanted it, and
that was disgusting. It was disgusting to make too much of oneself. Too much
of anything was disgusting. So she told the greengrocer family that she really
must be going. And the children tugged harder than ever at her skirts; and the
daughters hung away from her, the one very feeble, the other very angry; and
the mother forced on her the tremendous bouquet that she had been making
up; and the father gave her an old chocolate-box full of jewels, saying
shrewdly, "No, no, no money, not this time," as if in this way he was making
sure of getting quite a large sum of money from her in the future. Oh, how
disgusting it all was!
Suddenly she ran out, not being able to bear it any longer, hurrying in what
she thought to be the direction of home. She threw the bouquet of flowers—
they were already yesterday's flowers—as far from her as she could. And
when they fell it seemed very far away, like a very old yesterday. It seemed
like graves covered with withered flowers, and she knew that they were the
graves of all the mothers who had ever been. Oh, how fast she ran then! And
the faster she ran the further behind she was leaving all her love of flattery,
which was the same as soft- heartedness. For even when she had been
Frances Cat, underneath all her hard-heartedness and indifference she had
secretly hungered for appreciation and would have been quite ready to
sympathize with anyone who had appreciated her in the right way. That was
why she had had to be such a long, black sulky creature, to protect herself
from her own sympathy with herself. Mothers were people who got sympathy
with themselves mixed up with sympathy with other people. And other
people never had enough; so that not only did mothers never get to the point
of feeling sympathy with themselves, but they actually had to manufacture
more and more sympathy with other people. And more and more sympathy
turned into more and more and more people. And so, in throwing away the
flowers, she was putting mothers and sympathy out of her life for good; she
was—still more—wiping out the memory of ever having been born. Mothers
and birth and sympathy and flowers—this was all superstition and sadness
and going too slow. And yet, one ought not to go too fast, one had to go a
little slow, to make sure. Just now she must have been running, for she was
all out of breath.
She stopped to get her breath again, sitting down on what she took to be a
stone, though it was odd for a stone to stand right in the middle of the road
like that. But there it was, and she was very grateful for it, however odd it
might seem. And, in any case, the odder things were now, the more they
belonged to her world, and to her personal way of looking at things. No, the
things that were happening to her now were not so much odd as personal.
How personal everything was, and what a pleasure not to have to share it
with anyone! How odd, or rather how delightful, or rather how very proper;
for when things were merely odd, it meant merely that they were not quite
right—not odd enough. And while she was resting she opened the box of
jewels which the greengrocer father had given her. And what do you think
she found in it? Naturally she did not find jewels. Jewels do not exist, when
you come to think of it, except in the imagination. Still, there are many
interesting things besides those which exist only in the imagination. All the
time she was running she felt that there must be something interesting in the
box. And as what was interesting was also bound to be unpleasant, as
corpses and anatomy are interesting but unpleasant, or unpleasant but
interesting, so, when she opened the box—and very carefully—she said,
even before looking, "Ugh!"
And—Ugh! In the box, instead of jewels, were dozens of shiny insects of
every possible colour, with scarcely any space to move about in and yet
crawling horribly all over one another, making a noise such as paper makes
when you crumple it dead and throw it into the basket—and it goes on un-
crumpling itself a very little, and a very little, long after there is any life in it.
This was the kind of noise that was going on in the box, as of dozens of shiny
pieces of paper of every possible colour each uncrumpling itself ever so
slightly. "Ugh!" she said again, turning the box out on the ground. For it was
not so much the insects themselves that disgusted her as the idea of their
being crowded together like that and crawling all over one another. But once
they were on the ground, instead of exercising their legs and wings and
mandibles the way insects do when they first come out into the open after
being shut up, they all lay quite still, as if they were really only coloured bits
of paper, not insects. So she couldn't resist the temptation to smooth them out
and see if perhaps there wasn't something interesting written on them.
Well, there was something written on each of them: the name of someone
who had been so important that his name had lasted over beyond his
importance in his own time, as names have an absurd way of doing. That was
history, and how absurd it all was—names on paper. How absurd,
unpleasant, and, of course, interesting: to think of all the important people
who had been—and not only people, but all the important things that had
happened! Yes, it was all very interesting. Ugh! It was like banquets and
balls and lantern parties—and the next morning, how sick it made you, and
how ashamed of the things you had done and said, and yet how you went on
thinking about it all. Just so she was ashamed of history, and the silly bits of
paper. Should she tear them up fine, and let them lose themselves in the
wind? She did tear them up fine, but instead of getting into the wind they
seemed to get into her head and whirl about, making her feel confused and
giddy—so giddy that the stone on which she was sitting began to bob up and
down, and she on it. Indeed, she was sitting on a grey horse and riding at a
very jerky pace through—she must be riding through time!
But what of the coloured bits of paper? And what of the battles and strange
crowds and goings and comings through which she was riding—without
being taken the least notice of, as if she were the past and not they? That
came of making comparisons between herself and others, and long ago and
now. The comparisons had not been in their favour; she had not thought of
them in a jewelled way, as lovely people or things that had not been what
they really were, that would sometime be what they really were. No, she had
not wept over the past as if it were her past and she felt lonely without it and
sorry for herself because she was so alone. No, she had not hung back
imagining and hoping and wishing for a happy ending that could not be—such
as that everyone and everything might share in the happy ending of her story.
No, no. But she had made comparisons; and comparisons were a
responsibility, even when they were in one's own favour. Things long dead
came alive when comparisons were made; they might become no more alive
than insects, but even that was a responsibility. For then the insects turned
into bits of coloured paper, and the bits of coloured paper into strange, dim
scenes which you tried to make sense of as they faded, feeling guiltily that
you might be the cause of their fading—as who does not feel guilty when a
green fly falls downs lustreless and a nearly golden moth becomes a dusty
brown corpse, and a handsome striped wasp curls up like a stale sweet?
Yes, it was true; she had been feeling just a little guilty in her own good
fortune. Yes, she had felt just a little responsibility towards the world. Yes,
she was perhaps just a little sorry that things could not be otherwise. But
equally she was extremely pleased that things could not be otherwise. At any
rate, her horse was hurrying along in the direction of home and she had no
desire to stop it.
And the greengrocer father had actually expected her to come back
sometime—to pay! And for what? For her own thoughts about things that
were dead and gone. That was what was called education. Education was
expensive, like everything that wasn't necessary. How necessary was it to
study what had gone before, or the causes of present good or bad? If things
were in a bad way, it might be a comfort to one's vanity to place the blame on
what had gone before—rather than on oneself. But if things were in a good
way? She had, of course, tried to study the Indescribable Witch, but not with
any idea of educating herself. The Indescribable Witch was extensively
mixed up with herself, thinking about her was different. When someone has
inherited a large, imposing estate, she naturally wants to inspect it, in order
to acquire a proper sense of proprietorship; thinking about the Indescribable
Witch was like that. No, she could not honestly feel that she owed the
greengrocer father anything. Moreover, she had lost her purse. She could get
more money by putting her hand out of the left window, but such childish
behaviour went against her sense of proprietorship. In fact, something like a
conflict was going on between her and the Indescribable Witch on such
points.
Just then someone pulled at her horse's tail. It was the greengrocer father
himself. The horse slowed down, but did not actually stop, so that the
greengrocer father had to run to keep up with her. "Come, come," he said,
"are you not going to pay me for those chocolates you bought some time ago?
It's a very small debt, and my wife has gone mad since then, and my younger
daughter died, and my elder daughter killed herself, and all the little ones
have run away and got lost. Or if you won't give me anything, perhaps you
can advise me what to do?" And then she remembered that there had really
been chocolates in the chocolate-box and that she had really eaten them. This
made her very angry, not so much against the greengrocer father as against
herself. What nonsense she had been talking to herself about jewels and
insects and coloured bits of paper and riding through time on a grey horse—
or was it the stalk of a broom? That came of going for walks and taking her
ease like a rich woman with no fixed occupation. Long afternoon walks and
expensive boxes of chocolates—that was the danger if she did not get it into
her head that she was a poor woman. Yes, a poor woman, with nothing she
could really call her own. Could she even call her soul her own? Yes, she
could at least call her soul her own. Or, at least, she insisted on calling it her
own. Let the Devil take the rest. Poor people always left the rest to the Devil.
And she had no sooner come round to this way of thinking, than away she
was flying on the stalk of a broom, like a witch, leaving the greengrocer
father far, far behind. And whoop! Down she fluttered. And whoop! Here she
was, a poor woman stirring her supper-pot by her own poor bright fire. And
whoop! Out of the fire came the Devil himself to keep her company. "Sit
down and warm yourself," she said, in a poor woman's sharp, hospitable
voice, "while I get my thoughts together." And how had it happened that she
had let her thoughts wander?
It all came back to the Indescribable Witch. When she had gone for a walk
she had had it at the back of her mind to find her, if possible, and put an end
to her nervousness about her. She could no longer deny that she was nervous
about the Indescribable Witch—not interested in her, or merely grateful to
her, or afraid of her, but frankly nervous about her. She was, that is, quivering
with irritation that there should be anyone in her world more important than
herself. And yet she did not want to go against the Indescribable Witch, lest
she should turn out to be—as she was beginning strongly to suspect —very
much the same sort of thing as herself. The chief difference between them
seemed to be that the Indescribable Witch had a tendency to practise magic,
while she went about the story in a practical way. Was this because it was all
a new story to her, but a very old story to the Indescribable Witch? It was the
newness of the story to her that had led her back into history and made her
lose such a lot of time; and no good had come of that. And she had not been
innocent of a little magic herself, when she began getting bored with her own
musings over a chocolate-box. And how had the chocolate-box got into the
story, if not by magic, or even worse—idle greed? At any rate, that nonsense
was over—first being such a dear, wise little girl, then such a grand grown-
up lady. And probably a great deal of the nonsense that she had been blaming
on the Indescribable Witch was her own fault—the sun and the weather and
the money: just her own stupidity, or rather her conservatism. Conservatism
was the mother of magic. Or, suspicion breeds lies. It was all due to a
prejudice about what was natural. To a conservative mind it was the wrong
things that were natural; and so, to be believed in, a new thing had to have
something wrong, or unnatural, about it.
Or, if this new world of hers had come about entirely through deception,
she herself was the deceived one. And how could she deceive herself? Only
invalids deceived themselves; and she had always enjoyed perfect health.
And was it, indeed, a new world? There could be no doubt about its being a
different world, but who but herself was responsible for the difference, the
changing over from that world to this? And wasn't it a changing back rather
than a changing over? The question was, which was the original world, her
original world, the right world, the real world? She had certainly lived in
that world ever since she could remember, but was she any the less alive
now, and what was memory? Memory was fear. Yes, it was quite true: in that
world she had been afraid of something—death. That is why she had lived.
Was she dead now? In a way she was. What was death? It was being what
one really was. What was life? It was running away from oneself. It was
being not quite oneself—merely humouring certain whims. Well, what had
been the result of her merely humouring certain whims—what had she been
when she was being not quite herself? Had she had any whims of her own to
humour? Well, perhaps she had had just one: a whim to put things off. And
the result had been—it now seemed to her that she had been—a cat!
Oh, dear, what nonsense! Far greater nonsense than the little ball of light,
and the weather grains, and the left window, and the right window, and the
mirror that was not really a mirror, and the bits of coloured paper that were
also insects and chocolates and what-not. For these had been nothing but
thoughts; and thoughts, no matter how nonsensical, or whose they were,
exercised the mind. And thoughts passed. The little ball of light, and the
weather-grains, and the left window, and the right window, and so on, and so
on—these had quite disappeared now; and her mind was all the better for
them. But to have been a cat! That was a fact, not a thought. How could one
be all the better for having been a cat? Did facts exercise the mind? Did facts
pass like thoughts? No, no. Facts weighed on the mind, and facts stayed. But
had it been such a burden to be a cat? Why, no; it had been a very lazy life.
And was she still a cat? Why, no; she certainly had no whim now to put
things off. Had she, in fact, ever been a cat? Why, no; it had merely been a
state of mind—a not wanting to think. Or, rather, she had merely been saving
up her mind until she could be sure that she was really she. It was foolish to
use your mind until you were sure that you were really you. If you used it
before you were really you it was bound to be a tired mind by the time you
were really you: there was bound to be very little of yourself left for
yourself. There was a great difference between exercise and hysteria,
between having thoughts and imagining things.
Oh, dear, what a complicated business it all was! But better complicated
than simple. For example, she would never—if she could help it—be
Frances Cat again: it was too simple. When things were too simple they did
not last. Of course, when things were too complicated there was another
danger: they lasted, but one was inclined to be irritated with them. Thus,
while it was obviously more satisfactory to be what she really was than to be
idiotic Frances Cat, since in any case she would sooner or later have had to
work things out, it was nevertheless irritating to be what she really was and
yet not be able to describe herself in so many words. To describe herself as a
charming but imperious lady of independent means who didn't mind losing
her purse was better than calling herself a little girl wiser than her years.
And it was still closer to the truth to say that she was a poor woman sitting
contentedly by her fire—because what else could she do? But it wasn't the
truth; it was only a manner of speaking. Oh, the Devil!
But there was the Devil himself. Having accepted her invitation to sit down
and warm himself, he was obviously waiting for her to say something. So she
said, "Now what do you want?" "My dear," he answered with a confidential
slant of his head, "I want nothing but your happiness." "Hmph!" she snapped
at him, "you can't have it." "Now don't be alarmed," he said soothingly. "I
have been sent to you by the Indescribable Witch to see if there's anything I
can do for you." "That's a lie," she answered. "I am the Indescribable Witch!"
"Why didn't you say so before?" he asked, bowing to the ground so that his
tail stuck up like a broom. "And is there anything I can do for you?" This
made her realize that he was teasing her; so she jumped at him and jerked his
tail off. "There, that will teach you," she said. "Any more impudence, and I'll
have your tongue out. Now sweep the floor." She gave him his tail to sweep
the floor with, and it made a very good broom. But meanwhile the fire had
burned itself down and her supper had cooked itself to nothing. "Very good,"
she said, "that will save me the trouble of eating it." She was in a very lively
mood now. In her opinion the Devil was not sweeping the floor half fast
enough. "Perhaps he is not well," she said— not at all sympathetically.
"Perhaps he will die." How nice it would be if the Devil would die! What
was the Devil? Only a trial of one's seriousness. Could she be any more in
earnest than she was now? Hadn't she just deliberately let the cat out of the
bag? Hadn't she declared that she was the Indescribable Witch herself?
She could see that the Devil was poking his tongue into his cheek. "What's
the matter?" she asked peevishly. "Don't you believe that I am the
Indescribable Witch?" "And are you absolutely sure that you are?" he
whispered, leaning forward on his broom and shooting his long rubbery
tongue in and out of his mouth in a most exasperating way. "I am I, and there's
an end to all argument," she said. And with that she jerked out his long
rubbery tongue and trampled on it until there was no life left in it; it would
make a nice smooth pouch for keeping keys in. And then she broke his broom
in two across her knee; the stalk would do for a staff, the brush she stuck in
her hair like a plume. She felt, indeed, that she had good cause to rejoice. For
what was left of the Devil? Nothing but a burning sensation in herself of
being not merely the central character of the story, but the very story itself.
"Ha!" she cried like a knight who has escaped a fatal conflict by treating the
enemy as if he were someone not worth fighting with—much to the latter's
mortification. This was certainly the right way to treat the Devil, who
respected insults. "Ha!" she cried. "I have disposed of the author of the
story." No one had the right to handle her story but herself. She might be the
Indescribable Witch, or she might not; but if she was not, nobody else was.
And if there was anyone else present besides herself and the Indescribable
Witch, that person was the Devil, and the story was a lie. Well, she had
purposely let the story be a sort of lie, until she had got all the details right.
And at the proper moment, when she felt really at home, as only the poor and
humble can feel at home, she had treated the Devil as he deserved to be
treated—good-bye and no thanks.
And since she was the very story itself, it could no longer be called a story.
"A humble character like myself has no need of a story about her," she said.
"I'll just remove myself from everybody's attention." She did not go upstairs
—who was she to have an upstairs? But there was nothing inconsistent in her
having a cellar; and down into her cellar she went, making her way
determinedly with her staff, and bristling her plume—a hat with a feather in
it, really, such as self-respecting poor women always put on at least an hour
before they go out— against the low, sloping ceiling of the staircase. The
door at the bottom was locked and she found the key to it in the Devil's
tongue, or, more exactly, in her key-pouch. That left still another key in the
pouch, "Oh, yes," she said to herself, "that'll be the key to the glory-hole." A
poor woman always had a glory-hole, of course—in the darkest corner of her
cellar. And now she did a funny thing, for someone who considered herself
not only the central character of the story, but the very story itself and, further,
the solitary reader of the story: she turned round, before locking the door
behind her, and called up the stairs in a voice that made it plain that no one
was even to try to follow her, "Good-bye, and thank you for your interest." If
people had been attending to the story, they were now to consider her off
their minds. They had been sufficiently rewarded for their patience by the
mental exercise that they must have got out of it; it was as good as their own
story up to the point where she declared it hers, and hers only. In fact, it was
only the end that she insisted on keeping to herself. And they could keep
whatever end they put to it to themselves. Everyone's soul was her own.
Everyone was a poor woman who had a right to a hat with a feather in it, and
a stick to hobble along on when she went out—perhaps for the last time —on
business which was nobody's business but her own.
And certainly, with the door locked behind her and the key in the pool—she
had heard it splash when she threw it away—the story could be of no
possible interest to anyone but herself; and she knew exactly what was going
to happen. She knew that out of the pool into which the key had fallen would
come a serpent with friendly fangs. She knew that the cellar was really a
forest; the dampness was the dampness of a forest. She knew that the glory-
hole, which the other key would open to her, was really a room in the centre
of the forest where accounts would be settled once and for all between
herself and the Indescribable Witch. A sharp wind came up and blew off her
hat; in trying to catch it she let her stick drop. Then the wind quieted down
suddenly. She had lost her hat and her stick and was feeling very, very poor
indeed in the dark, and all the more resolved to have her rights. The burning
sensation (of being the very story itself) glowed out of her like a thin
phosphorescence, just baring the huddled trunks of the trees, which were
nearly sweating with fright and embarrassment at being there at all. And the
black pool glinted, green and angry. And the serpent with the friendly fangs
darted out of it, the leaves of the trees quivering with excitement.
By this time she had opened the door into the little room where the scales
that could not cheat would weigh out her rights. And no one must know the
outcome—except the serpent, which was justice. It was playing on the scales
already, tipping them up and down. Least of all must Frances Cat know the
outcome. She locked the door quickly behind her, just in time, for she could
hear an insistent scratching on the door, then a loud purring, as if to say, "You
know you'll let me in." Nothing of the sort! The serpent with the friendly
fangs broke exactly in two, and the scales balanced to a stop. The friendly
fangs flew up, changing into many, many birds, or rather into songs. Or rather
into such a chatter. Or rather into an explanation of everything in a language
that no one could possibly understand but herself. The truth at last! No more
need of the scales, then. They began swinging round and round, scattering the
serpent's body flakily all over the room in fine grains like grains of weather.
"Why," she cried, "it is the beginning of the story again!" And just to keep
outsiders from coming any further in case anyone had, in spite of all her
precautions, followed her right back to the beginning, she said, "The
Indescribable Witch and I, having carefully divided our world between us,
the poor world of two poor Nothings, thank you for your interest and hope
that you are satisfied that everything has been honourable and above board."
"Nothings indeed!" laughed the Indescribable Witch. "I should like you to
understand that she has absolutely no authority to speak for us. She was only
a story about my cat, which had got lost. I only made her up to distract your
attention while I went out looking for my cat, for no one must see me. I didn't
find my cat, but she'll be here in a moment. Cats always turn up the moment
after you have stopped looking for them. You know what cats are—just like
minds. You die and wake up thinking, 'Oh to have at least my mind back.' And
then, a moment after you have given up hope, back comes your mind to keep
you company. Now I am always dying. Whenever somebody dies, I die; and
somebody is always dying. But my cat always comes back. My cat is, as you
know, the law of inevitability, and I am, as you know, that famous poor
woman, the truth." And then there was a small, strong ticking: the world was
going round again! And Frances, who had of course been let in, was happily
stroking her black fur into place with her tongue—she had been in and out
everywhere. "I hope you are satisfied," said the Indescribable Witch, "that
everything has been honourable and above board?" Frances, in reply, slanted
her ears back, tucked her long rubbery tongue into her mouth, waved her
friendly serpentine tail, and leaped on to the Indescribable Witch's shoulder.
Her eyes were on a level with the Indescribable Witch's eyes. Who could say
whose eyes they were—since one couldn't really see the Indescribable
Witch? Poor woman! No, poverty did not become women. Who ever noticed
a poor woman? Who ever noticed anything about a poor woman but her cat,
and who really noticed a cat? Ah, she needn't worry: she was safe from
description.
Every time her cat got lost she knew that there would be a death, and when
it came back she knew that somebody had died. When people died they
became a poor woman—a Nothing; they became the poor truth; they stopped
imagining things. At first they thought, "Oh, to have at least my mind back."
Indeed they had their minds back—they had not really lost them; they had
only lost their imaginations. Each of them became a poor woman with no
future before her. Instead of a future, there was only a cat. There had really
been a cat all along—a whim to put things off. But now they had to admit to
themselves that the imaginings out of which they had made their lives were
only things that they had had to put off indefinitely because they would never
be. This is what every poor woman says to herself, looking at her cat: "It can
never be." If she forgets to say to herself, "It can never be," allowing her
mind to wander, sure as life her cat gets lost. And sure as life there is life;
and naturally, a little later there is death, when her cat comes home. Cats
always come home.
Oh, dear, what nonsense! Will the nonsense never end? And the small,
strong ticking—will the world always go round again? I'm afraid so. For,
though when people die they become poor women, and every poor woman
keeps her business —which is nobody's business but her own—all to herself,
so that you might think that there was an end of that, still, there remains the
whole problem of the Indescribable Witch. For every poor woman is the
poor woman. And the poor woman is the poor truth—a Something. And a
Something is what the Indescribable Witch is. When people die they become
the Indescribable Witch. They become, that is, her cat, since in becoming
poor women they become poor women's cats, since there is really only one
poor woman but any number of cats. The Indescribable Witch is one poor
woman and a cat that is any number of cats. A poor woman with only one cat
is a Nothing. For one cat is as good as none; cats are always getting lost.
True, they always come home. But what are you while they are not at home?
Just a poor woman out on business which is nobody's business but your own
—out looking for your cat. But the Indescribable Witch never goes out. She
stays at home waiting for all the cats to come home—it is really only the
poor women who go out looking for them. And the cats come home, but the
poor women never. She, in fact, is the poor woman: there is only one poor
woman and any number of cats.
Perhaps you can't make head or tail out of all this. Well, you're not
supposed to, any more than, when Frances leaped on to the Indescribable
Witch's shoulders, you were supposed to be able to tell whose eyes were
whose. The trouble is that you insisted on following the story: that's why
there's not an end of that. For no matter how far you follow, there remains the
whole problem of the Indescribable Witch, and what a Something is. You
insist on knowing, do you? Well, why don't you know? Does anyone stop
you? Haven't you followed the story as far as you liked? There you are! You
have forgotten to say to yourselves, "It can never be," and allowed your mind
to wander. Sure as life your cat has got lost, and so sure as life there is life.
And that is why there's not an end of that. And that is why there remains the
whole problem of the Indescribable Witch, and what a Something is. For the
whole problem of the Indescribable Witch, and what a Something is, is really
the whole problem: "What happens in the end?" You can't get it into your
heads that in the end nothing happens— nothing more. You keep waiting for a
Something, forgetting over and over again that it can never be. You die, well
enough; you become a Nothing. But you can't help hoping that a Nothing is
really a Something. And so you become a Something, since if you are a
Nothing you can be whatever you like. You become the Indescribable Witch
—she who knew from the very beginning that in the end nothing more
happens. Yes, in spite of yourselves you will little by little get it into your
heads. And so, in a way, there is an end of that.

A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY

THEY say that the earth is round, but we know that it is not. And yet, if we
tried to prove that the earth was not round, we should be forced to admit that
it was, though we knew with absolute certainty that it was not. It is always a
great mistake to try to prove anything, for then it is only what we do not know
that counts, not what we know. If we know a part of the truth, but not the
whole truth, people who know nothing at all are able to prove that we are
wrong and they are right—in whatever they choose to call right.
Fortunately, we shall soon know the whole truth; in the meantime it is best
not to try to prove anything or to let ourselves be drawn into an argument. We
know now that the earth is not round; but soon we shall know with absolute
certainty what is round. That the sky is round and that there can be no
question, therefore, of the earth's being round, we shall know with absolute
certainty, when we have had our last lesson in geography. We are about to
have our last lesson in geography.
Following the sky we could never do more than get back to where we
started from, for the sky is round. It falls in, having no strength of its own. It
falls in upon the earth—but that is no reason for calling the earth round. What
is the sky? The sky is the minds of the weak people, those who don't want to
go anywhere. And the earth is the minds of the strong people. And surely it is
an odd circumstance that the strong people should give in to the weak people.
What can possibly have made the strong people give in to the weak people?
Only that the strong people are not so strong as they pretend to be. This is
how it came about that the strong people agreed with the weak people that the
earth was round. But the strong people did not mean, in agreeing with the
weak people that the earth was round, to give up their right for ever and ever
to go anywhere. They were only saying to the weak people, "Very well, we
are not so strong as we pretend to be and will give in to you—for the time
being. We are still very young and not fit to travel very far. We will not leave
you yet." And so the world— that is, the earth and the sky together, or the
strong people mixed with the weak people—went on. Or you might call the
world the mixture of the young people with the old people; for the weak
people are the old people, and the strong people who are not so strong as
they pretend to be are the young people.
But the young people grow stronger in time and little by little go away,
while the old people never go away. They are the weak people, and they
have never been anything but weak and old as well. They could not go away
even if they wanted to. They are old from staying always in the same place,
being too weak to make changes. They are the people whose minds are the
sky, and the people who make the weather. They are always grumbling a little
—how cold it is to-day, or how wet it was yesterday. But they are glad, after
all, to be where they are. And the strong people whose minds are the earth
put up with it all because they need a place to stay in while they are still
young. For if they started out on their travels too soon they would last no time
at all. The object of the strong people is to last for a considerable time, while
the weak people do not think about lasting. And this is why the world suits
them so well: it is only a moment long, though they make this moment seem
like forever. And this is why they need the earth; for it would be most
unpleasant to live their moment out in a mere sky, all confusion and falling
over one another, with nothing to stand on. It's nice for them to have the earth
to stand on, and to have the strong people about to make things interesting.
The sky, as we are beginning to understand, is round, and it's nice for it to
have a centre to fall in upon. Otherwise it would be a miserable tangle of
weak people treading one another to death. As it is, they tread on the earth
and die feeling themselves everlasting.
So you see how important it was for them to prove that the earth was round,
and to keep it from being taken away from under their feet. And the strong
people gave in to them for the time being, since they were not quite ready to
go anywhere, all their talk about the future being, up to a certain point, only
talk. Indeed, it fitted in with their plans to confine themselves to talk for the
present, for they did not mean to start out— quite apart from not being yet
strong enough to start out— until they had chosen from among themselves a
First One. And before they could choose a First One it was necessary for
everyone to be well acquainted with everyone else. It was necessary to
thrash out all disagreements and develop a common point of view about
things, so that any one of them might, without discredit to the others, become
a First One—it being a matter of expediency who was actually chosen. For
among strong people there can be no inferiors. But there can be difficulties
which one person is capable of dealing with better than another from
accidental advantages of position. This is expediency. In expediency there
are no petty personal considerations, only the general good.
It happened, then, that a certain man among the strong people, called
'Tooth', one day saw his way clear to going on a really long journey. Thus he
became the First One; and no one was jealous, because he did not come
back. Why he should have been the First One, and not someone else, was
simply a question of geography. At a certain point the earth went straight on.
Exactly where this point was could only be revealed after all the strong
people had each taken a fixed position—any fixed position; then one of them
would find that his position moved. The strong people did not, of themselves,
move—that was what the weak people did, and that was the explanation of
roundness. When Tooth found himself moving he knew that he was the First
One. And all the other strong people knew that he was the First One, since he
was not there any more. They had, in fact, chosen him to be their First One.
Had not each one of them taken up his respective position and left just that
position for him? This was the way the strong people did things.
So far as Tooth was concerned, he was not moving; he was merely holding
his own. But there could be no doubt that he was going somewhere. He was
taking advantage of an energy not his own. His own energy he preserved; he
was strong. He was moving straight on—not horizontally, not vertically.
Horizontal and vertical motions were illusions of round motion, horizontal
motion being towards a spot where one already was, vertical motion being
away from a spot one had never really been at. His motion was still motion.
The earth that he was moving on was really flat. It had an end. Its beginning
was the strong people. Its end was an energy not his own, nor the energy of
any of the other strong people. Its end must be a woman. The strong people
were all men. The weak people were men and women mixed. After a time
Tooth sat down; if he sat down, there could be no mistake about his not
moving.
He sat down and his muscles stood out. How strong he looked! How strong
he felt! "Ah, my strength," he thought, "how beautiful I am." This was not the
beauty of the weak people, who all admired one another. He admired
himself. He needed no one to tell him that he was beautiful. He sat quite still
and saw nothing but himself, his beautiful strength, beautiful because it
absorbed all his attention. But he knew he was moving by the feeling in him
of wanting to tell someone else about his beauty and his strength—not one of
the strong, people, who were all as beautiful and strong as he was, nor any of
the weak people, who did not know personally what either beauty or strength
was (since they knew things only as ideas); but someone different from
himself, someone beautiful, and strong also, and yet different. There would
be admiration between them, but it would not be mutual; it would be rather
like each one being surprised that there should be the other. He knew he was
moving by the surprise he was beginning to feel at her. He was, in fact,
already in her presence and she was already saying, "I am beautiful and
strong."
She was beautiful, and she was strong, but her muscles did not stand out,
and there was very little to see of her. She was a spirit. "Ho!" he cried, "I am
beautiful and strong." Their insistence astonished each of them, and there was
nothing to do but laugh at each other. They were obviously not going to argue
about it. "Come," she said, "you are a body and I am a spirit, so let us be
friends." Tooth was still sitting down, so he got up; he wanted to show that he
knew that he had arrived somewhere. He was beautiful and strong, but he
was not stupid—he had no imagination to be stupid with. The weak people
had imaginations, the strong people had wills. The strong people always
knew what they were about, since they were always doing what they wanted
to do. But the weak people, who never did anything, were always thinking
about things that never actually happened; and so they were always in a
confused state of mind. They knew this, and, of course, didn't like it. So they
said, "We are poor confused creatures, but this is because we are not God,
Who alone knows about everything." They were poor confused creatures, of
course, because they were poor confused creatures. By 'God' they really
meant the strong people, though they were naturally too proud to admit it.
The peculiar thing is that, although by 'God' they really meant the strong
people, they did not admit the existence of people stronger than themselves.
"Everyone," they said, "is weak, except God." By 'God' they really meant
nobody; that is, they meant that they refused to recognize any difference
between the strong people and themselves. She didn't come into the question.
They didn't want to know very much about themselves or whatever there
might be besides themselves. And so not only did she not come into the
question, but even the strong people were kept out of the question. There
was, in fact, no question. They just said 'God' instead of asking questions,
and this was supposed to make everything right for the moment; and for the
moment it did. The strong people, on the other hand, did ask questions; this is
what having wills meant. And all their questions resolved themselves into
one question; any particular question amounted to asking "What next?" and
all the questions resolved themselves into the single question "What last of
all?" And so with them she naturally did come into the question; for she was
last of all. And the strong people always knew what they were about, since
they were always doing what they wanted to do; they wanted to go as far as
they could, and so they went, knowing as they went along just how far this
was.
"I suppose this is the end of the earth," Tooth said in a tone that showed
that, no matter how surprised he felt at her being there, he felt no surprise at
his being there. "Yes," she answered placidly, "this is where things are done,
once and for always. I've done all my own work already." He looked about
sceptically, for he could not see any signs of work. It was only a place, and
an empty place. There wasn't even nature there. They were standing on
something, but it wasn't even rubble. It was plain that he did not take
seriously the idea of her having done any work. This did not offend her,
because theirs was a quarrel-proof relationship: they did not depend on each
other in any way. He had certainly got there by her energy, but equally by his
own will. Their meeting might be described as the perfect accident.
"If you stand where I'm standing, you'll see better what I mean," she said to
him, as if it were more to his advantage than hers that he should be convinced
that she had indeed been doing something. So she disappeared, and he stood
where she had been standing. Nor did he himself move in putting himself in
her place; it was the energy of her disappearance that put him there.
Similarly, he had arrived at the end of the earth by the energy of her
appearance at a point that had previously been, as far as he was concerned,
anywhere. Of course, standing in her place, he saw the whole situation
clearly. He saw the earth, a point round which a world had been built, a point
that was only the beginning of the earth but which the weak people had made
into a whole—a beginning and an end and therefore a round earth. He saw
the beginning of the earth, and how its end was not the same as its beginning,
but another point: the earth, in fact, was a stretch of time. The weak people,
in fact, had not even got to the beginning of the earth; they lived before the
beginning. For once one was at the beginning it was impossible not to go to
the end. The earth was a stretch of time. It was the strong people themselves
one after the other, making a bridge between nowhere and somewhere—
anywhere.
And he now saw the bridge, and the work that she had been doing—first of
all the changing of the nowhere at which the earth started into something that
flowed like water under a bridge. A bridge has to be over something. The
water under the bridge was the woman herself accompanying the strong
people from nowhere to somewhere. Standing in her place, he saw clearly
that she had been the water. She had come along secretly under the bridge.
He saw that water was a thing under land. She had come along, waiting until
the strong people should find out how many they were. There was an infinite
number of weak people, but the strong people were numbered. He now saw
that their number was the parts of the body. Each of them was a body, but
also a part of the body. And the parts also had parts. He was a part, a Tooth.
But Tooth, instead of having parts, had other teeth, each almost the same as
himself. It might seem that this was also true of Nails; but a Nail was not so
independent, so numerical a part of the body as a Tooth. Nails were the Teeth
of Hands, but their identity was largely lost in Fingers, which in themselves
were only theatrical creatures. He was a Tooth, and that is why he was the
First One. It was his fate to be a Tooth; it could not similarly be said of any
Nail that it was its fate to be a Nail. There was really greater likeness
between Hair and himself, though his sympathy was with Nails. But Hair was
almost too independent and numerical; antipathy rather than sympathy existed
between Hair and himself. Hair was the Last One.
She had come along and been water until the strong people should be
numbered. Before the strong people knew how many they were, the end of the
earth had been anywhere—in the water. When Tooth became the First One
and Hair the Last One, the end of the earth changed from anywhere to
somewhere. The water itself had come to an end and got up on the bridge:
she was the end of the bridge, the shore at the other end, and perhaps she had
also been the shore at the end where the bridge started. But all that was her
business—her work. She might be round, but the earth—the bridge—was
flat. In any case, her roundness was not achieved by motion, like the
roundness of the weak people, but by size. There was only one of her, and
she was big, and her bigness was somehow determined by the number of the
strong people. She was at least their equal; what she was at most did not
come into the question. Understanding now what she had meant by saying that
she had done all her own work already, he got out of her place back into his
own, and she again appeared before him. His own work, of course, was to
destroy the bridge and yet save all the other strong people. And he must do
this by her energy rather than his own. And this was love, not love as the
weak people meant it—hoping against hopelessness. In this kind of love
there was neither hope nor hopelessness; he merely waited for something to
happen. This kind of love was loyalty to himself. The other kind was a sigh
of envy—all the more foolish in that the weak people didn't know exactly
what they were envious of, what they loved. The strong people certainly
inspired envy in them, yet it certainly was not the strong people they loved?
"We are poor confused creatures," they said with a sigh of envy, "but we do
love God." The strong people inspired them with envy, but exactly what they
loved so enviously was a mystery to them. And they preferred it to be a
mystery. They didn't really want to go into the matter.
But how to set about loving her to her face? Tooth had obviously loved her,
as all the other strong people had loved her, from the beginning. But now he
had to love her in a way to bring about the destruction of the bridge, instead
of, as before, in a way to bring about the creation and completion of the
bridge. Loving her at first meant keeping away from her, thinking of her as
behind. But all this time she had been coming along at an even pace, and now
she was in front, since their number was complete; they were at their end,
and she was their end. But how could he keep away from her now, mixed up
with her as he was, except by destroying her? And how could he destroy her
without belying the quality of their friendship, which was based on a mutual
sense of humour? For if, in loving her face to face, he grew too serious about
it all, then his desire to destroy her would amount to mere envy, and if envy
came into it she would undoubtedly have nothing to do with him, as not being
her equal; he knew that he was her equal only because she made herself his
equal. He would find himself destroying, instead of her, the God of the weak
people—himself and all the other strong people, in fact; which would be a
pretty joke indeed. The weak people were always destroying themselves.
They were so serious that they didn't understand the difference between
humour and joking. By only a very fine margin of logic was there any
difference between joking and humour—hoping against hopelessness, and
waiting to see what would happen. She too was waiting to see what would
happen. By a very fine margin of logic the whole thing was not merely a joke,
a tearful wash-out. Both he and she felt that there was an interesting point to
be made. To make an interesting point was the long and short of humour; and
their friendship was based on a sense of humour. Humour was not joking.
Humour was lying, and admitting that one was lying, for an object. Joking
was lying without an object. The strong people were, of course, not strong at
all: that was their lie. But in calling themselves strong they had an object—to
exist for a certain time. The weak people, though they called themselves poor
confused creatures, had no object. They no sooner came into being than out
they went. It was all a joke.
Her side of it was that she made their object hers. She was something that
did not exist, as they existed, and yet was. She had no need of existing
because she always was, and yet she existed in their way—as a person—in
so far as she made their object hers. And why should she do this? The
answer could only be that she had a sense of humour. Indeed, the humour of it
all came from her. They had only will, which was honesty —admitting their
lie, and apologizing for it by having an object in making it. She met them
half-way and supplied the humour for herself and them. She had to meet them
half-way —which meant making their object hers—since there was nothing
that she could hold against them. They were lying, but they admitted that they
were lying. And they were not lying by way of philosophy, but for an object,
which they also admitted. And this object was somewhat futile, which they
also admitted: they might succeed in existing for a certain time, but they must
cease to exist when the time was up. If there was a joke in the whole thing, it
was a joke against her. A joke was either against the other fellow or oneself.
The weak people's joke was entirely at their own expense, since no other
fellow came into the story with them—God was nobody. With the strong
people the joke—if there was a joke—was against her: that she had to let
them exist for a time, having been met halfway by them in every possible
objection she might reasonably raise. So what could she do but be humorous
about it all? There was an interesting point to be made, and it did her no
damage to have it made, and it certainly was gratifying to them.
If Tooth remembered that her object was the same as his, loving her face to
face would not be difficult. Since she had assisted him in his object up to
now, she could not refuse to assist him in the final transformation of his
object (the object, that is, of all the strong people) into an achievement. She
must assist him in destroying herself. No, more than this: she must destroy
herself. He stood at the end of the bridge, all the other strong men coming up
behind him, and faced her resolutely. As he did this, he was not only Tooth,
but Teeth. And the rest of the strong men came up close behind; first the Right
Hand, then the Left Hand, each with its Nails, and, last of all, Hair. They
joined themselves to him, so that he was not only a body, but the body. Every
part of the body went with another part. Hand went with Mouth, and, since
Mouth was only a hollow, there were two Hands—one to be Hand, the other
to represent Mouth. And there were Arms and Legs, and Stomach and Brain.
And as Stomach was only a hollow, Brain was also Brains, to represent
Stomach.
And what of Tooth and Nail? Tooth wasn't so much a part of the body in the
body—a part of the making of the body— as the whole purposefulness of the
body. Tooth had to do with results; that was why he had been the First One.
Nail was really the same as Tooth. For as Mouth was the talking about, or
anticipating of, results, and as Hand was Mouth in artificially forcing results,
so Nail was Tooth in being sharp to seize on things—though they might not
actually be results. As for Hair, it resembled Tooth not only in that it was, by
persistence, Hairs, as Tooth was, by persistence, Teeth, but also in that it
enjoyed, like Tooth, a very independent status in the body. Indeed it was
technically more independent than Tooth; Tooth went with Nail, technically,
but Hair went with nothing but itself. But then Hair was almost too
independent —it was so independent that it was practically dead. Tooth's
independence was a matter of leadership; Hair's independence consisted
merely in hanging back. That was why Hair was the Last One. Something too
might be said about Bone, which came between Tooth and Hair as a peace-
maker. Hair was persistent because it was lazy and suspicious: it was
stubborn. Tooth was really persistent. Bone was persistent because it was
stupid. It neither led nor hung back. It was impartial; and in its impartiality it
was Bones. Hair was outside the body, Tooth was at the edge of the body.
Bone was altogether inside. Where opinions differed, therefore, Bone could
speak for the body as a whole better than any other part—as in an argument
between one Estate and another it is the Common Citizen who really has the
point of view of the State.
All this was clear as the strong knitted themselves into the body; and the
knitting together of the body was accomplished by Flesh, which was not a
particular part of the body but the feeling which each part had of being as
much the body as any other part. And as the strong people became one body,
the body, it grew as big as the woman who was a spirit. And she was now
not only a spirit but the spirit. She was the spirit of the body. She was inside
the body now, deeper inside than Bone. Apparently the body, under the
leadership of Tooth, had put its Hands on her, and driven its Nails into her,
and eaten her! Or rather, she had fed herself to the body, carrying out the last
condition of the humorous love-pact between them. There was nothing now
but the body, and the spirit deep, deep inside it, deeper inside than Bone. It
was she who spoke for the body as a whole, since Bone was, as a matter of
fact, quite dumb. This was the result Tooth had been after, this was really to
exist for a certain time. The body was not only beautiful and strong, it was
true: there was nothing else besides it. The body was absolute for as long as
it lasted.
How long would it last? No, the question was rather: How long was it
lasting? The number that summed up its life was the number that summed up
Tooth—thirty-two. There was also the number that summed up its death,
which was the number that summed up Hair—the number that would never be
counted. In Hair the strong people—individually speaking —drifted back and
were lost among the weak people, who instead of becoming one body,
became countless images of her, false spirits. The sky and the earth
separated, and the sky vanished as false spirits vanish. And the earth—the
bridge— also vanished; both the strong people and the weak people
vanished. But the body of the strong people was there, because the spirit was
inside it. And the spirit was deep, deep inside the body, deeper inside than
Bone. And what was the number that summed up Bone? The number that
summed up Bone was zero. From zero numbers sank into infinity, into Hair;
from zero they rose to a mortal limit and result—to thirty-two, Tooth, Teeth.
The number that summed up Bone, who could speak for the body as a whole
better than any other part, was zero. Bone, that is, was quite dumb. And so it
was she who uttered the zero. And in uttering it for the body as a whole she
naturally made zero into one, since one was the number of wholeness if it
was actually spoken.
But thirty-two was the living length of the body. This was the number of the
earth, of the will of the strong people doubled into its utmost strength. The
first doubling was the breaking into two of one, which was really the number
of her. And there were five doublings before the will must fail. For after the
fifth doubling fast come the millions; and in the millions fast is it zero again,
and slowly one again. But five was the number of the senses. Five times the
body knew itself. The body increased through its five knowledges from none
to thirty-two. Beyond this was the knowledge of her, whom the body could
not know singly and who could not be known but singly. And since the body
could not know her singly, she came inside it, deep, deep inside, to the depth
of five; and the body knew her in its five knowledges singly.
The first knowledge was the hearing of her, as of a spirit at an unknown
distance from the body. The second knowledge was the touching of her, as of
unknown spirit. The third knowledge was the seeing of her, a spirit like eyes,
to see whom is only to see with. This was the intermediate knowledge,
during which will changed to compulsion. The fourth knowledge was the
quick inhalation and exhalation of her, when she became a passion, a spirit
unbearable to know, yet unbearable not to know. Then came the fifth
knowledge, the actual tasting and knowing of her, like a spirit swallowed,
eaten, absorbed by a body—which, of course, could not really happen, only
seem to happen. And at the fifth knowledge she changed finally from a spirit
into the spirit. This was the knowledge that Tooth, the First One, achieved.
She was not only inside; she was everywhere. The body was somewhere,
but she was everywhere. It was her body, and she went everywhere with it;
but at any point it was only somewhere, while at any point she was
everywhere. Alas, the strong people—she was the body now. And this was
the beginning of the sixth sense, the sense of speech, which the strong people
had previously enjoyed only as a weakness borrowed from the weak people
—a sense suffered rather than enjoyed, a sense of the impossible, which in
the weak people had meant stuttering notions of immortality, and in the strong
people, up to now, only a terrible crying out sometimes with a pain they
didn't feel. Nor was it so much the sixth sense as the nth sense—a sense of
death. Alas, the strong people—they were dead now. She was the body now,
and the body had but one sense now, the sense of speech. One sense only had
the body now, and one knowledge: to speak, and to know that the words it
spoke were only broken meanings of the word that she spoke—even as at any
point the body was only somewhere, while at any point she was everywhere.
You ask me, "What is this word?" It is a word not to say but to know. It is a
word that as a number is one in its nth multiple of oneness, or none in its
oneth multiple of everythingness.
You see how it is all a matter of the humour of the thing. Not that our story
is on that account any the less true. It is true that the earth is not round; but we
have had to learn that lesson oh! so cautiously—in order not to interfere with
the natural course of history. Lessons in geography must not interfere with
history. Geography contains many errors, but history corrects these errors—
which are, indeed, the substance of history—by passing. Lessons in
geography are really quite unnecessary. For example, if we had not had this
lesson in geography, we should, in any case, have learned soon enough that
the earth was not round. In fact, we have let a great deal of history into our
lesson, in order to interfere with it as little as possible. History, that is,
consists of inaccurate statements; and, I assure you, we have made a great
many not altogether accurate statements. Nothing, for example, is quite so
inaccurate as numbers. But we have got on, have we not? We have allowed
the strong people to exist for a certain time (as was our object, and as they
were destined to), and shown how close they came to the truth, in so
perpetuating themselves. We have also shown that they could not come so
close as actually to be the truth. The truth is a world which lasts for ever, and
the strong people do certainly exist for a certain time. But to exist for a
certain time in a world which lasts for ever can only mean to be somewhere
—here or there or there—in it; only she is everywhere in it. And here, we
must admit, we have gone a little too far in our lesson. But not because we
are interfering with the natural course of history. Rather because we have
finished with history, having let it take its natural course, and the rest is not a
subject that can be taught. There are no more errors to be made, and so no
unnecessary lessons to be given.
The rest is, even still more, a matter of the humour of the thing. For we have
been deceived by our own delicacy into talking about something that we
should not try to talk about— at least not in this way. It is all very well to
exploit the very fine margin of logic by which humour differs from joking,
and delicacy from cleverness. It is all very well to know somewhat how one
really stands. But the very fine margin is the impossibility of saying in so
many words exactly how we stand. The very fine margin is the difference
between so many words and so many words. We exploit this margin and
learn—I suppose we may say that we learn how to smile; which means, I
suppose, that we learn what to smile at. We learn to smile at what cannot, for
all our delicacy, be put into so many words. I suppose we have put it into
some words; but, strictly among ourselves, we know that we have not said
more than that it is a smiling matter. We only know that the relation between
him and her is based on a mutual sense of humour. We cannot but know this if
we know that a relation exists between them at all; we cannot but know this if
we know about her.
And at this point we have to be still more careful of our attitude, the rest
being, even still more, a matter of the humour of the thing. The rest is a
subject that we cannot teach. It is simply and purely the subject of her—her
alone. Granted that we know about her; but it is a subject that we cannot
make a lesson of. We can give a last lesson in geography, with the finest
smile on our faces, but we cannot give a lesson in perfect understanding.
During this last lesson in geography we did our best to smile, though we
were not quite sure what we were smiling at: we knew, at least, that not to
smile would show that we did not understand, and that if we confessed to
ourselves that we did not understand we should grow discouraged and weak-
minded and have to rely on history alone for instruction—which would have
meant throwing ourselves miserably back into history. We all know the
importance of a little geography—of a little intelligent information as to how
the land lies, even if we do not understand why it should lie just like that.
And we smile, not quite sure what we are smiling at. But beyond this? To go
on smiling, and to feel not merely that we do not altogether understand, but
that, in effect, we do not altogether exist, that, in effect, only she altogether
exists, that only the truth altogether knows—in which we cannot give
ourselves a perfect lesson, since we as a whole do not altogether exist?
That is the question: can we, in these circumstances, go on smiling? If you
can, if we can, you, we, are indeed saved. To go on smiling is to be
somewhere—here or there or there—in the world which lasts for ever. For
that world is in itself a smile. And to wear a smile, and to continue to wear it
—well, that is always a sign of good will; and good will, believe me, is not
easily forgotten. Surely she will not forget that here or there or there certain
smiles faded into her smile, certain broken meanings or words into her
meaning, her word? Surely she will remember how close we, you, came to
being everywhere and lasting for ever? Do you not already begin to feel
yourselves engraved in her memory? Her memory is a smile engraved with
smiles, a word expressed in words, an everywhere mapped out from
somewhere. This, at any rate, is how I feel about it. I do not feel that things
are quite so bad as they seem. A great deal of pleasure would, I feel, be
thrown away if our attitude became too stoical. If there is anything left to us
at all beyond a last lesson in geography, it cannot but be, I feel, rather
pleasant. This is why I have stressed throughout the humour of the thing. I
was sure that if we could go through a last lesson in geography with a smile
on our faces the rest would be not at all hard to bear. It would make me very
happy if I could feel that I had imparted a little of my optimism to you.
IV: A Crown for Hans Andersen

1
THERE are many strange things to try the understanding of man, and some
things stranger than others, and one thing so strange that it makes man say not
"How strange it is!" but "How strange am I!" And in this strangeness of
himself man is either afraid or not afraid. If he is afraid he grows older and
older, in the loneliness of his strangeness and of trying to understand it; more
and more blind to that so strange one thing by which he himself is so strange.
If he is not afraid he grows younger and younger, in his pleasure to be
something, no matter what, in the same world with that so strange one thing
by which he is able to feel, though perhaps not understand, himself.
The thing makes itself less strange to the child-man who is not afraid. The
great one makes itself into the little people. And it's not there but here. In
fairy tales it's here, though a wizened kind of here—like the thoughts of a
sensible and practical child. In the tales of the bemused black people
everything happens 'here', too. They as much as say, "Where else should we
be? Would it not be presumptuous in stupid creatures like ourselves to call
where we are a separate place?" That's to be stupid and yet know how to
behave well. Fairy tales are to be stupid and yet to be as wise as possible,
being stupid. Such an attitude makes friendship possible. Richard Rolle
sought a friendship with Jesus. "Jesus Christ is the end of my desire," he
said. A fairy-tale-man does not talk like this. "Oh," he says, "what luck to be
here! I hope everything will be all right." Then there are fables. Fables are
not fairy tales. A fable-man says, "We are where we are, and the important
thing is not to commit ourselves one way or the other."
"No," says the bemused black man, giving a different turn to the matter, "we
must not imagine ourselves the centre of things. Even when we are not happy
we must not over- complain: it is man who forces himself on things, not
things which force themselves on man." Then there is the fantasy- man. "No,"
he says, "we are unequal to the strain of our own sensibilities, but what a
temptation! Nothing but disgrace can come of it, but what a temptation, to
take liberties and meddle with the secrets—what a beautiful disgrace!"
"Yes," says the bemused black man, "the secrets that are not spoken of except
by the initiated dance-men. Even they would rather dance than speak of them;
for in the dance one may be only foolish, but in speech one may be both
foolish and wicked." But the Grimm Brothers say, "What are these secrets? Is
not everything nonsense that cannot be spoken of intelligently? So why should
we be afraid to talk nonsense? If it is nonsense, so much the worse for it. If
you do not approve of your portrait, Queen Story, you must be content to
remain invisible." Then there have been the many story-makers who do not
think about Queen Story at all. Everything is Mr. Story this and Mr. Story that
with them: Mr. Chekhov, for instance: "How very simple a thing a story is,"
he said, "just a pretty touch or two to our own disgusting portraits, and there
you are." And then Miss Mansfield, sickly fancying herself the poor,
neglected Miss Story of the after all so very busy Mr. Stories, sketches her
own portrait apologetically, saying, "Yes, dear me, I'm not a lively subject."
And, in sum, what would the world of stories have done without Hans
Andersen?
Hans Andersen saw this here, this little seen place, this place where man
and the other thing may be together—never mind on what terms. The place is;
everything depends on man's looking at the situation in the right way. The
right way is to look and not to see too much. You see little like this, but what
you see is true. If you close your eyes to the other thing, you see man himself
as the here, and a very big here it can look. Look around you and see how big
everything looks. And it's all lies and closed eyes. To tell the truth you have
to look at the truth. Hans Andersen looked at the truth and saw small and
talked small: this is what his Fairy Tales are. Hans Andersen is looking; he
meant what he said for now—in a little while, now. If you are too proud to
talk small, and want to talk big, as if you were one day going to tell the
whole truth, then don't look at the truth; and that not-looking makes prophecy,
and the talking is of a future not to come about in a little while, or ever.
That's pride—you are talking about how big your eyes are. "Wait," you are
saying, "until I look at the truth. That'll be a tale to tell."
Seeing the truth in such a future makes time. Someone not yourself, but
rather an exaggerated opinion of yourself, is saying, "Wait until I am alive,
the real I. Just wait until then." Hans Andersen was alive now. Then is the
now of the history- men. The now of fairy tales is no different time from the
always in which the different thing lives. It is a little moment in always. But
the history-men are not satisfied with a little moment in always shared with
the different thing. They want an always of their own. And so their now is
only a then, always a then. Their now was then. Hans Andersen was alive
now, but their story-king, King Arthur, is alive then. King Arthur is already
crowned. We have still to put a crown on Hans Andersen. And in order to be
able to do so we must think of ourselves as that Queen Story to whom he
yielded himself and who, because he yielded himself, in a little while yields
herself in the crown she puts on him. If you find it impossible to think along
with me, I am sorry. Perhaps in a little while it will not seem so impossible.
At any rate, in a little while it must all be over.
In a little while Queen Story must have put a crown on Hans Andersen; she
must really let loose the little people, her sympathies. For in this always of
man and the other thing, the other thing must be quite small—not to embarrass
him. And there must be any number of it, since man might easily miss it if
there were only one of it—he might easily miss his little moment in always,
poor fellow. Man finds it so difficult to see things. But he can manage to see
—just a little, and in a little while—if one is gentle with him. If you cannot
think along with me in this, you must, of course, think along with King Arthur
and the history-men. If you are then-fellows rather than now-fellows, you can
only think of yourselves as King Arthur and, remembering back, put up your
hands to see if your crown is still on. Ah, yes, it will still be on. Queen Story
will not take it off: it is not that crown with which she means to crown Hans
Andersen. That crown is no real always, only an always of eternal dying. But
do by all means make it your glory, if you cannot honestly take pleasure in
what is not heart-breaking.
I will even think along with you a little, to show that I bear you no ill will
for not being able to think along with me. It is difficult, I realize, to change
your habits at this late hour. You have been practising futile fortitudes so
long, so long held your broken hearts together, so long put a noble look upon
disappointments in ambitions that you should never have allowed yourselves
—it is difficult, I realize, to abandon suddenly this heritage of tragic dignity
and make child's play of your immortal souls. Ah, how you have worried and
how old you have grown! And what have you worried about? You have been
so afraid of death, so afraid of losing you knew not what. Always, dying, you
have lived again, not quite dying. You have been so afraid of failing to be, in
the end, all that you might have been. And so you go on being over and over
what you have been, since no more than this may you be. For the true worry
is not what you shall be in the end; you can be nothing different from what
you have been, what you are. The true worry is to learn to die, to make
child's play of your immortal souls, to enter gracefully into death in spite of
being unalterably what you are. Death is not merely the end of life; it is a
place. The true worry is not how, from dying, to go back to life, more life,
but how, from dying, to go on, to be forgiven in what you are, to forget for
one little moment in always your private meanings, to know for your moment
the meaning of always. The true worry is only to say to yourselves softly, "In
a little while." Perhaps, if one is gentle with you, you will manage. But it is
difficult, I realize, to change your habits at this late hour.

2
The chroniclers disagree about every important event in the life of King
Arthur (it is not easy to keep always remembering back). But they all agree
that he had transcendent virtue. His virtue was that he would not give up
hope. This was his virtue, and this is the curse by which the knights of the
Round Table ever renew themselves (brave, tired ghosts) against his Second
Coming—rex quondam, rex-que futurus. He is the perfect one of this jealous
society—all that each in the end may be if he outwits the death which kills all
that he might have been were it not for death. For death is made of something
greater than man. Cannot man defeat death, they ask, by being greater than
himself? And each knight is a man greater than himself, yet none is greater
than the other. And King Arthur is the greatest: he is the presiding greater self
of all of them. They are jealous, suspicious, restless; fatally united in their
jealousy, suspicion, restlessness.
To prove his right to the crown Arthur had again to pull the sword from the
stone pillar and drive it home again—on Twelfth Day, and then again at
Candlemas, and then again at Easter, and even again at Pentecost. Nor do
these knights mean to be pure or wise; they mean only to be undefeated. The
great Lady Lile of Avalon sent a sword to Arthur by a damozel; and he could
not pull it out of its scabbard, for this could only be done by a pure knight.
And of all the hundred and fifty who sat at the Round Table with him drinking
rich wine from gold- mounted drinking-horns and eating hot peppered
collops, and of all the thousand and more others who feasted in other parts of
his great palace at Caerleon (or it may have been Camelot), no more than
three were clean. But Arthur did not worry himself to know. He did not go
adventuring in quest of the Sangreal; he did not love his knights to do so.
German-hearted Perceval and Galahad had gone, it is true, and succeeded, by
their virginity: succeeded and forgotten their vow to their king, and never
returned. Only Launcelot had tried to be both in one always and the other. He
had indeed seen the Sangreal. But he lay senseless on the ground for twenty-
four hours after; then he returned to Arthur's court, and the braveries of which
the false Guinevere was Queen.
 Guinevere could not but be false; as the always of the history-men can be
no real always. Their always is a bold human there; and there can no queen
rule, no human creature is a queen. A true queen is Queen Story always. And
yet these were honest men; King Arthur is no villain. He is the true-born
Englishman, whose quest is his greater self. Defoe sneered, "And where is
our greater self? Where does it all begin?" And, indeed, there's no knowing
where it all begins, because there's no knowing where it all ends. It does not
begin, it does not end. It is all a legendary battle with a legendary sorrow,
over which there are legendary victories, uncelebrated—uncelebrated, since
these are honest men: King Arthur has not come a second time, they keep
silent.
Who is King Arthur? Was he indeed begotten by King Uther on Igraine—
what chronicler truly remembers? And the Table which anyone may see to-
day (even at Winchester)— what chronicler will swear it was the Table
then? And what of the lost sword of Launcelot, and the lost mantle of
Caradoc, and the lost skull of Gawain—what chronicler can find them? And
who is King Arthur? He is the dead man. And he lives on, beyond his given
time, by the magic of memory—the magic of Merlin. The magic words are:
"Surely there is still a span to go? Surely this is not the end?" And such is
Englishman's luck—to be dead men, to hang on to time, to go back again, and
back again, crying, "Surely we can amount to more than this?" Such is
Englishman's luck. And it is good luck as it is shame, and bad luck as shame
is pride. In Shakespeare it was good luck and bad luck balanced, shame and
pride at war, self- hate answering self-love. In Shakespeare time has
suspense, in King Arthur vain repetition.
Is King Arthur, then, no better than Merlin, his evil spirit? Can habits
change at this late hour? Habits cannot change, no, not at any hour; but
exhaustion may come. If he have no
Second Coming, if he fail, then will King Arthur succeed. If his last battle,
with Modred at Camelford, be indeed his last battle, then will he—in a little
while—truly die. Then will the tournaments and the hunting and the
banqueting, and all love, conquest and glory, have been the false glamour,
Merlin's enchantment, the greater self that could not be. For while man's
shame of himself may become an evil spirit, it may also become, through the
wearing out of the evil spirit in the wearing out of pride, dead pain of what
he is, what he has been. This is not child's play, nor to forget. But it is to rest
silent, remembering; to lie still though not in bliss. It is truly to die—in the
flesh. The death of the mind, the forgetting of the private meanings, is but a
shorter way, and a surer way. By the longer way many are lost, by the shorter
way one at least comes into always: the child which man is comes into open
life, though the proud ages of himself remain proud ghosts behind, grave-
locked.
In the end King Arthur disowned Excalibur, the sword he had won by
Merlin's arts—Merlin's power in his own right hand. Or so it seemed. Or so
it is, if there be no false Second Coming. He told Bedivere: "Comfort thyself,
for in me is no trust for to trust in." Launcelot turned holy and put on a
hermit's habit. But King Arthur died. And with him all of the Round Table
died: he was each and all. Bedivere hesitated to throw Excalibur into the
lake, as Arthur bade him; Bedivere's hesitation was his own. So Sir
Pellemore and Sir Palamides in pursuit of the Questing Beast had been
Arthur in pursuit; it was Arthur who had first sighted it. Launcelot's evil
love- making with Guinevere had been Arthur's evil love-making. And
Modred even was Arthur—from whom he had the deadly wound, in spite of
his magic armour. And Sir Bedivere was all Arthur's love of his sword;
Launcelot, all his disconsolateness in death. King Arthur died; Launcelot still
futurizes the Arthurian to-day.
And immediately the fairy ship drew near. And in it was Queen Morgan le
Fay, from the island of Avalon. Some say she was his sister. Others know she
was the spirit of death. How long he had been away on Merlin's business! It
was Merlin who had first charmed him into carrying Stonehenge over from
Ireland; Stonehenge was the Devil's chaplet, which gave the Irish genius—
trouble. At last Arthur no longer troubled; at last Arthur rested. Launcelot
perhaps does not yet rest: the Englishman is still the dead man tossing in his
grave. Yet he is not, at least, of the lost tribes which leave the grave by an
idiot or demon power of the dead body and wander in nowhereish hells. By
the magic of Morgan le Fay he is indeed dead. By the power of death King
Arthur sleeps. It is a haunted sleep: he dreams—remembers. He may not
perhaps wake into the true always, forgetting. But neither will he wake into
time again. He tosses as he dreams: Launcelot tosses, Launcelot perhaps
lives. But he is a hermit, no knight of glory; and his cell is a grave. Launcelot
tosses. "Nevertheless Arthur came never again." So wrote the matter-of-fact
Wace.

3
When he was a child Hans Andersen made himself a toy- theatre and learned
how to sew clothes for his puppets. For his head was full of fancies, and
what to do with fancies? You can't walk with them in the street or sit them in
chairs beside you: people would laugh at you and say, "Why, those are only
fancies." At school you learned not to do things that other people would
laugh at. What did people laugh at? Oh, anything different. Hans Andersen's
head was full of something different. But what to do with it, where to put it?
At school he was taught not to do things that other people would laugh at. At
school he was a very stupid boy, and he hated school. But he was also a
sensible and practical boy. At school they tried to teach sensibleness and
practicalness, though not his sort of sensibleness and practicalness. Their
sort was to put fancies far away, his sort was to keep fancies near without
making them seem ridiculous. He wanted to protect his fancies from the
laughter of other people and yet have them here with him—or be here with
them. He wanted to live with his fancies as humble people live with the
world in which they live, sensibly and practically. There are trees, and the
trees bear fruit, and they eat the fruit and tend the trees—and what more can
they do, and what less?
But at school it was taught how to live with people. To live with people is
to cut the here away from under the feet and live in the imagination. The
imagination is a world of man's own. There is also the way that primitive
people live, neither in the imagination nor in fancies, but in a here which is
they do not know exactly where. Hans Andersen knew where, although he
knew very little about the kind of world he was in. And he preferred being in
this world, which he saw with small eyes, to being in an imagined world
which would make his eyes seem big. But the world of people had its big eye
on him: it was kindly trying to educate him in its sensibleness and
practicalness. And, being a sensible and practical person himself, he was
loath to be thought a fool by people who were in their own way sensible and
practical.
The fear of being thought a fool caused Hans much un-happiness. It made
him go to school for a long time, although he was stupid at school and hated
it. It made him try to write a great many things with his imagination—instead
of with his fancies. And it made him, thinking where he should put his
fancies, try to put them on the stage, which is where people put things they
only believe in. But he failed in his stage way of being sensible and practical
because, stronger than the fear of being laughed at, was his knowledge that he
knew; he could not hide this in belief. There are certain canny ones, such as a
certain canny Sir James, who make themselves a comfortable fame with
people, by believing in fairies—such fame as a traveller makes himself by
journeying out and then journeying back. It is a canny thing to come
journeying back. Such ones clink golden spurs and clatter golden heels and
walk high, thinking how they have kept in with their fancies without falling
out with people. But the gold at their heels they have got from people. Hans
Andersen shall have gold on his head, he shall walk so much higher by a
crown.
Hans Andersen was a clumsy one. He had no great luck in the world of
people, except that at last his body fell out of bed into it—out of fancying into
it—and that he got his death in it; his body indeed came journeying back, or,
rather, tumbling down. And that was a very good sign. When you go
journeying out and really get there (here), it's a good sign if the news comes
journeying back instead of you. Yes, a very clumsy one was Hans Andersen.
He had the clumsiness of earth; he didn't try to make that a matter of golden
heels. Indeed, he knew all about shoes; his father was a shoemaker—another
clumsy one. What, in fact, can be clumsier than a shoemaker—or shoes to
walk with on earth, as if that could be an unclumsy thing to do? A tailor is
still another clumsy one: he tries to cover up the clumsiness of the people of
the earth—which, of course, can only be done clumsily. When Hans
Andersen was a child and made puppets, he sewed for his puppets; he was
going to be a tailor, it seemed. To be a tailor, or a shoemaker, or any clumsy
one, is to see the clumsiness of the earth and of the people of the earth. And if
there are fancies—honest fancies—they are clumsy fancies; they were
clumsy puppets.
And what isn't clumsy? That so strange thing is surely not clumsy. How do
we know? How do we know about anything, except by comparison? You are
always comparing one of you with the other: that's how you know the ways in
which you differ. And the ways in which you resemble one another—how do
you know that? You know it, naturally, by comparison. You would not deny
that by comparison you are all rather clumsy? By comparison with what?
With a feeling of grace which you feel the more as you feel that it is not your
grace: what does it matter whose grace it is so long as there is grace? Thus
by comparison may a feeling of clumsiness become that feeling of grace
which cannot be without, first, a feeling of clumsiness.
Do you not remember how it hurt the poor Little Mermaid to walk—as if
she were walking on the sharp edges of knives— when she cast off her fish's
tail for love of the prince she had saved from drowning? And how did Hans
Andersen know how it hurt? He knew by comparison—by how it didn't hurt
him and by how he yet knew. And he also knew that it would never not hurt,
because she was as different as grace from clumsiness. He called her 'the
Little Mermaid'; but she didn't stay a mermaid. And then he couldn't follow
the difference any further. The Little Mermaid began escaping comparison;
she began to become immortal. But he shall have the crown the Little
Mermaid was to have when she attained immortality; for what he took to be
the Little Mermaid was his own slow flight towards self-forgetting and
thinking only of grace.
But meanwhile he still felt the big eyes of the world of people on him and
his fancies. And the people and their earth were facts as the different thing
was the truth: both were so, and both strange, though the different thing
stranger than the earth and its people. He saw the facts with the same small
eyes with which he saw the different thing. The four winds were not sizeless
monsters: each was no bigger than a man. Nothing of the earth-world was any
bigger than a man, and a man was small. He was clumsy and small. Hans
Andersen felt his own earthly clumsiness; he saw with his clumsiness. And
so he saw the different thing as fairies. And he must not lose his clumsy self
until he had the fairies by heart, from feeling grace by comparison, and saw
himself through them rather than them through himself. Then only might there
be an end of clumsiness. And so ever since passing through the Valley of
Death (through which man must pass before reaching the Island of Bliss in
which is to be found the Garden of Paradise) Hans Andersen has been very
slowly, and very patiently, forgetting himself—so patiently that all the time
he has kept saying to himself "In a little while." It might, he thought, take
three hundred years. "And we may even get there earlier"—making one of the
Little Mermaid and himself—"through the goodness of children." And what
is the goodness of children? It is patience: to be anxious for the good thing,
but meanwhile to wait as patiently as possible, saying "In a little while."
Meanwhile he had to wait patiently. The Little Mermaid has, indeed, still
the whole way to go: the way seems up through the air, which means the
brooding wish only. The prince who really did get on the way went in—not
up; we know that he got on his way because the rest of the way went in and
in, more and more tinily. But even he, when he thinks he has arrived, has still
not arrived; he has still not seen small enough. "When I call 'Come with me,
come with me,' " the Fairy of Paradise tells him, "remain where you are. Do
not follow me into the room where the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
grows, and under which I still lie sleeping." So long as there seems space to
go there is still big-eyed illusion, the Fairy of Paradise is still a woman of
earth-size to love in an earthly way; as the women of earth are the gross
vision of the Fairy of Paradise. And the Fairy of Paradise waits for a
thousand and a thousand years, until the prince shall see small enough to see
truly.
 The prince is man on the way to true childhood. When he is truly a child,
then the Fairy of Paradise greets him like "a happy mother rejoicing in her
child." But he has first to struggle with his manhood, first to love the Fairy of
Paradise as any woman. When she calls "Come with me, come with me," it is
not herself speaking, but his own manhood. When he follows her and takes
the forbidden kiss from her as she lies under the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, it is his own big-mindedness and self-love that defeats him: he
cannot see her for himself—as a small object before the eyes can interfere
with the vision of a whole countryside. And when he had kissed her, there
was a clap of thunder and everything vanished— "the Garden of Paradise has
sunk into the earth." There was still a long way to go inward. There was still
manhood to be used up—still more life to be lived before death could be.
The prince was no proud knight of the Round Table, but even he had a
humbleness to learn. For however humble his mind, by his body he was of
the same manhood. And meanwhile, instead of Paradise, there was only the
bright morning star of futurity.
And how to be dead? One way only: to live. But Hans Andersen had no
happiness of his manhood. He knew his manhood as pain, he endured the
pain; and pain endured becomes a wise hunger. Hunger may be fed on truth,
or it may be fed as men feed themselves when they cannot endure pain—on
the unripe fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Hans Andersen
tried to sing: to forget his hunger. And when he could not forget he tried to
dance. To dance is to destroy life. But he could not dance, because he had
given his life to the Fairy of Paradise to be destroyed in the true way.
For a long time Hans Andersen was ashamed of his Fairy Tales; he was not
sure. He was sure of the Fairy Queen, that she was, but he wanted to be very,
very sure of his own right to dwell with her; else he was only a fool and his
fancies, at whom sensible and practical people had a right to laugh. Things in
the true world must not seem foolish in the imagination-world of man. Things
that happen in the true world do not show, cannot show, in the other—simply
because they are true. If anything shows in the imagination-world that is
supposed to be happening in the true world, then it is not really happening
there (or rather here); it is only somebody's foolishness. So the proper
answer to the question "Where to put fancies?" is "Where they do not show."
Come, Hans, soon you shall be on that side of the eye where it's no shame for
fancies to show.

4
Stories, no matter what they tell of, must be just a little pleasant. A story must
make the best of its material. There is always something wrong with the
material of any story (to realize that something is wrong is what starts a
story), and the story must make a best of this, better than which it cannot
become. There's a best good that a story must be content not to be. Rabelais
showed how ridiculous and disgusting it was for people who were far from
perfect to have too greedy an appetite for the best. Cervantes showed how
sad it was to be too greedy. The Decameron showed that a nibbling appetite
was at least on the safe side.
In the Nibelungenlied there is a greedy pursuit of whatever may be had in
large quantities of good and evil indiscriminately, as man finds all good and
evil in himself. In the Reynard histories there is a smug satisfaction in a
middling way between good and evil. In the Ulenspiegel histories there is a
smug satisfaction with penury. In the Faustus histories there is a smug hate of
starving. In Eastern stories there is a smug starving. In the Gesta Romanorum
there is a smug despair. In the Malory histories there is a smug carelessness:
a claiming and not claiming. In Wace there is a smug reserve ("Such rhymes
are neither bare lies, nor gospel truths"). In Layamon there is a smug
confidence in the benevolence of Queen Story ("she shall make my wounds
all sound"). In Chrétien de Troyes there is a smug self-protective wit—as if
Queen Story were only a flirtatious handmaiden of truth to whom one gave
only one's heart (a heart can be easily taken back). It is difficult to avoid
smugness in stories. "Ah," says Mr. Story-teller, "this is only a flash in the
pan. You should see my real work."
Stories grow into novels; novels are tracts on fate. The un- captured best
good becomes merely the rhetorical excuse of the writing: there is no such
good, only an impossible possibility with which man teases his eloquence—
there is no Queen Story. So at the end of every novel there is silence and
exhaustion; it has all been a futile pantomime of exaggerated emotions. And
novels become lazier and lazier. The laziness takes hold of stories
themselves. They are no longer stories, only 'short stories'. But a story is not
lazy; it is sentimental. There is something in the story not clearly rendered,
but the confusion is a token of resignation, not laziness; there is no shame of
confusion or laying the blame on fate. The confusion is precious: it is the best
that can be done in the circumstances.
The eighteenth century tried to kill sentimentality. Too many people had
become sentimental. Something goes wrong when too many people become
sentimental. With most people it must be a case of not knowing. With a few
people only can it be a case of knowing exactly. With just a few people more
it can be a case of nearly knowing—a nearly knowing, I mean, as true in its
way as knowing; just as Hans Andersen knew as well in his way as one to
whom truth must be truth, not merely Queen Story, his beloved. For one who
exactly knows there's no end of knowing; one who can no more than nearly
know must rest where his mind fails. And this in its way is endless —endless
pleasure; it's making the best of things in the circumstances. But most people
are all circumstances—and no best whatever to be made out of things, only a
passing way of people with circumstances. When too many people practise
nearly knowing, then sentimentality is a stale cloud lingering over the truth,
and those who exactly know turn away choked, waiting for the cloud to pass.
For sentimentality is then not a resignation in knowing as best one can, but an
idiotic content in circumstances—a gospel of inferiority by which makeshift
truth is all truth for the moment.
The eighteenth century tried to kill sentimentality by suppressing inferiority
and starting all over again: this time with a limited number of superior minds,
for whom the rest of mankind was not so much a vaguer humanity
inarticulately attendant upon their consciousnesses, as the animal man,
already prehistoric. The only immediate reality, then, was a superior spirit
called 'human reason'. But in making such an absolute distinction between
nature and reason—in cutting himself in two and treating the inferior part as
an antiquarian subject— the surviving creature became an artificial being; he
had no historical actuality because he could not go on. And he could not go
on because he had separated himself from the stupid original energy which
inspires journeying out, in being the standstill motion of circumstances. He
was merely the meaningless product of the arrestation decreed by his
superiority: a self-conscious idler.
But the inferior part could not, of course, be so easily turned into a
museum-piece. The only result of all this was that a great many
sentimentalists strewed the ground—not a bad thing. And then Napoleon rose
like a plague of vampires from the graves of the dead sentimentalists, to feed
on the blood of the few sentimentalists whom the eighteenth century had only
put to sleep. For sentimentality cannot be entirely killed. The few
sentimentalists who are not too many wait—until there is going on again, and
so following on. For the sentimentalist is one who goes, but not first. There
must be those who go first; there can be those who follow. And there must,
also, be those who do not go at all—those against whom, as against heavy
circumstance, man goes on in spite of himself. And who are those who go
first? They are those for whom there's never an end—who go on from one
moment in always to another, not content merely to forget themselves, merely
to know enough to forget. For those who are content merely to know enough
to forget it is enough to see their beloved in the distance (always in the
distance) and to say to themselves "In a little while." For those who go first
there's a longer while, after the little, of knowing never enough—and, instead
of a beloved, always a truer truth.
But we are not talking now of those who disdain to be gentle with
themselves, and ask no gentleness. Perhaps that's too cruel a story for the
readers of stories. As a story, that is, it can only be a cruel story. Which is
one reason why we must tell of it in quite another way, in what will seem
quite another place.
To go back to our story then: we were just saying that Napoleon rose like a
plague of vampires from the graves of the dead sentimentalists, to feed on the
blood of the few sentimentalists whom the eighteenth century had only put to
sleep. Hans Andersen was born against Napoleon: he woke up in time.
Queen Victoria, too, was born against Napoleon—or rather against the
forced death in which the superior minds of the eighteenth century involved
themselves as well as vaguer humanity. "Come," she said, "nobody's dead
yet. You must all keep going." And she made the inferior and the superior
parts mix and be an honest average fellow. "You can't decide yet," she said,
"that you're particularly this, or particularly that: that remains to be seen.
Before you come to the last analysis you must get it quite clear what, as a
whole, you are to begin with—not what you are as against what you were,
but, simply, what you are. The time hasn't come yet for talking about what you
were. The important thing is not to be too clever. When people are too
clever, they get stuck. And the important thing is to keep going."
There was no danger with Hans Andersen of being too clever. The
important thing was to keep going just long enough to reach an end—
somewhere else, something else, a life not so hatefully one's own only. Never
mind what became of one, never mind if one did not, practically, exist. The
important thing was to remember again the something by the forgetting of
which one had once existed so greatly. One had had one's fun—and it hadn't
been such fun. And the journeying out was really a journeying back. To get
back again—that was really the fun.
Well, perhaps we are none the wiser for touching on this and that aspect of
this and that. We did not set out, after all, to be wise ourselves, but to go
along with the wisdom of Hans Andersen as far as it went. For the moment
that is surely far enough. Let us see if we understand, at least, where that is
taking us. Well, as to that, we can only judge by what seems to be happening,
by how we see things perhaps a little differently from how we used to see
them when we—when you—were all tumbling wiseheads at school behaving
like little gods about to become big ones. Of course we see things a little
differently now. Of course we did not turn into big gods, but grew more and
more doubtful, even, if we were little ones? That, at any rate, is how the
story should go, for nothing new ever happens; it is only that we grow tired
and see things a little differently—a little more as they really are. And what
is seeing things more as they really are? Well, let us see.

First you notice that everything on the earth doesn't stand straight up. You
begin to notice more and more things that slant, and you begin to feel quite at
a slant yourself. And then you begin to feel quite comfortable like that, as
cripples manage to feel quite comfortable; and the other things at a slant
begin to look less miserable. The poor daisies are really resigned to being
poor daisies; the unhappy old house is not so unhappy as all that; the dead
larks are not altogether gruesome; the ridiculous storks are sober fellows
after all. Then you think to look up at the moon. Ah, that explains everything!
How the moon slants—when you compare it with what seems to stand
straight up. But how straight it seems when you compare it with the things
that slant: they seem straight, and the moon seems straight—and how
everything else slants. That is, everything else disappears, and what's left is
quite a little— but how straight up it stands, how much straighter than what
used to seem straight up.
What is left is stories. And is nothing left but stories? For the time being
that is all we can say. We can't really do anything but finish the stories. And
when the stories are finished, what will be left then? While the stories are
moving towards their end there is the direction in which they are moving.
What are stories, indeed, but a direction away from one place that is also a
direction towards another? And the end of stories comes when the direction
away from turns entirely into a direction towards: when the direction
towards is almost the same as the place towards which it is the direction,
because in a little while one is sure to arrive. The direction is, in fact, the
same as the place if you think of the place as made up of places. You come to
this place or that place and you think of yourself as being in the place; as,
when on your travels you cross the border into a new country and come to the
first village in the new country, you say, "Ah, now we are in the new
country." But there's still all the rest. And the first village is really not very
different from the country you have left behind. There's still all the more and
more different rest—the heart of it, as they say. When stories end that's what's
still left, and for the time being that's all we can say.
But who are the travellers who go further? Why, those who set out first—
even before stories began. How shall I explain it? Well, we might say that,
actually, it's the earth itself which set out first—the earth that moves. For,
actually, there are two earths: the one that moves and the one that hangs
behind. The one that hangs back is the one that seems to move round the sun;
the moving one is the one that seems to stand still, looking towards the moon.
The one that at any moment seems at a stand-still—that's the one on the way
to the moon; and the all- year-round one, last year's one—that's the one that
hangs back. But not all the things on last year's earth are all over with; some
things hung back, went the way of the sun, only because they didn't have the
strength to move. They hung back, but how they wished they had the strength
to move. And there goes on being always another last year, and another, and
always some wishing. And it's the things that wish that have the slant when
everything else on last year's earth seems to stand so straight up, and that do
not disappear when everything else disappears—because somehow, by a
strength that comes of the weakness of wishing, they manage to follow the
earth that moves.
There's Little Thumb out for a little corner of Paradise which she can call
'Little Paradise' at the top of her letters— as any of us who live abroad take
pleasure in putting strange place-names at the top of the letters we write back
to last year's earth. And will she find it? Indeed she will, in a little while, by
the wish of all things whose wish she is. And until then she'll write at the top
of her letters "As from Little Paradise" —you know how we all take pleasure
in writing "As from". Then there's the vain fir-tree, going on from one last
year to the next last year, very proud of going on, very proud of standing still.
Where's the end of that? Why, the fir-tree withers, and of course stays behind
and disappears. But in so far as there's a story to tell, the fir-tree knew that
something was wrong; and in so far as it knew that something was wrong, it
knew also that something was right. It made the mistake of thinking, while it
grumbled, that the something that was right was its own grumbling—a
mistake that is very natural with grumblers. Its own grumbling was the
something wrong, of course; and how there came to be any question at all of
a something right was that Hans Andersen took pity. "Am I," he said, "any
clearer in my mind than that? Perhaps not. Poor fir-tree, poor me.
 And this is how the fir-tree came to be a story. And this is how there's so
much odd baggage taken across the border into the new country. And when
the odd traveller with his odd baggage gets across he settles down
somewhere and makes a home of it; perhaps it's the odd baggage that makes
him feel at home, though it's being across the border that makes him feel
happy. He forgets about his old home, but he's not too clear about the place
he is in now; he has made him another home—that is to say, for all his
wishing he can't get nearer the heart of it. But he's as near as wishing can take
him; he's across the border. True, if he could have done better, the border
itself would have disappeared. He would not merely have settled down in a
new home; he would have gone on into the heart of the new country, never
settling down, but learning more and more about it. But this could not be,
because it's only a story, and all stories. So must it be with a story, and so
must it be with all stories. With a story there can be only an end. It's good
when there's an end; but it's better when there's an end and then something
more—what comes after an end. And what comes after an end? Why, more
and more. But indeed we have no business to be going into that now—or
even in a little while.
Come, there's Little Claus as well as Little Thumb to think about. Well,
Little Claus is no Little Thumb, as we know. He's a clever tourist, with a
talent for making a little money go a long way. That is, he'll cross no borders
but have a very good time travelling as far as he can in his own country; and,
where the mountain is on one side this country and on one side that, he'll stop
short and say to himself, "Well, where's the difference?" And think of all the
money he'll save by not crossing over, and think of all the fun he'll have
sitting at the top, with his money safe in his pocket, telling the inquisitive
ones who don't know where they're going, "Yes, this is the way to the other
side." And think how fat his pocket will grow as one by one they say, "Oh,
thank you," and timidly offer him a reward for his pains that they hope he
won't think too small. And, of course, nothing would be too small for that
information, since the inquisitive ones who don't know where they're going
can only cross over into nowhere different. Not so with the information that
his girl-cousin Little Thumb gives on the other side. For all those who come
to the place where she has settled down really know where they are. As they
come to where she is, to settle down there too or go on a little, they ask,
"This is the other side, isn't it?" But they only say that for the pleasure of
saying it, since they really know. And when she answers, "Yes, this is the
other side," that's only for the pleasure of saying it. And there's no awkward
fumbling in pockets, since the pleasure is equal on both sides.
 Well, there's Little Claus and the merry soldier of the tinder- box and all
those clever ones who have their rewards, and then all those inquisitive ones
who have their losses. And then there are all those happy ones who have
their pleasure. And then there are all the foolish ones—the dancing
princesses and the proud princesses and the blustering boors and all the
absurd ones from giant to fly: everyone on both this side and that agrees
about them. And then there's Little Tuk, with his lesson to learn. Who knows
how he'll turn out? Well, since there's a chance the right way for whatever
makes at least the beginning of a story, he may as well have his chance; and
so Little Tuk knows his lesson next morning; and we'll see. And after next
morning? We'll see—in a little while. Who knows? Does anybody know yet?
Well, then, on with the book.
King Arthur's Second Coming was only an unfair looking to the end of the
book, before the story was done, and then back again, to try what other
ending the same story, the same stories, might be taken to: to try if the ending
might not be forgiven them, if the book might not go on, eternally, where the
ending came, and nothing to mark an ending. And the book goes on, eternally,
yes, but only by the closing of it, only by the ending of the stories, all the
stories. For what is forgiveness but the will of man to forgive himself? And
that is the ending: to learn that he can forgive himself nothing, that if he
would go on with the book he must end. And that is the going on after the
ending: more and more to learn what heals better than forgiveness. And there
are those who deny the ending, who will not be healed: these are the earth
which disappears. And there are those who accept the ending: these are the
earth which goes on. And of these there are some who are strong in wish
only; these must make of the ending both an ending and a going on. These
must make a little go a long, long way; these must call the ending, their last
moment, a first moment of always, and from this first moment know
somewhat all of always, in which any moment is a taste of always as it tastes
in every moment.
And so, until the end of the book is reached, in a little while, much wishing
and as much patience as wishing. Holger Danske may come in many shapes.
Barbarossa waits under a mountain of patience. And every hero armed with a
wish is a Dane, but every Dane is a child of patience. Canute the Great made
himself Canute the Small by the tide at Westminster. And the dark metal pig
in the little cross-street near the Piazza del Granduca in Florence? That
carried its rider round to all the beauties of the city without stirring from its
own humble stand? Why, that's only to say, "And away we go!" while poor
time that carried us stays behind. And is that anything to cry over —is a metal
pig anything to cry over? Why, yes, if in crying over it you forget. What's a
metal pig but a thing to forget, and what better service can you do it? But
suppose it brought you away: is that gratitude? Why, what better gratitude
than to say, "And away we have gone!"—the truth of which you can only
prove by forgetting it.
And then there's the crown you find on your head. It seems —yes it seems
—a golden crown; and indeed the metal pig was no golden pig. Was it even a
silver-plated pig? Oh, no! And yet—and yet, if you try to remember it, your
forgetfulness shines like silver, polished silver, over the hidden base metal of
memory, hollow within. But your crown is a golden crown. Is it all a simple
matter of alchemy, after all? But have we the time to go into that? Oh, no, we
have no time at all. What, not a moment? No, not a moment, except this one.
So you see we must hurry on; for if we stop for a moment, to wonder about
how it has happened, it will never happen. There's no looking back on this
moment: there's only a looking towards it. There's no stopping if our wish is
not to leave matters there. Our wish is to leave matters here—where the
book begins to be not a story-book. Our wish was to get at least as far as that.
Was not that your wish?
We began with a purpose to put a crown on Hans Andersen —all of us
together, in the name of Queen Story. This is what I now think: suppose we
postpone the crown, for the moment, by way of leaving matters here, and go
on as we have been going on, lest we do something on which it may be
possible to look back and so leave matters there. You know how one tends to
belittle whatever one can look back on; and there are many aspects of this
question of putting a crown on Hans Andersen which, frankly, would arouse
in ourselves all our most snobbish feelings—as hard-headed literary people
—if we paused to think what we were doing, what we had done. Let us
rather—as hard- headed literary people—go on with our somewhat inhibited
writing (or reading writing, which is surely not very different from writing
reading) in the confidence that in a little while everything will seem perfectly
natural. For the truth is, we are all, like Hans Andersen, rather shy—though
for very different reasons. I, for example, because I want to do nothing of
which anyone can complain—since complaints are a sign that one is
befriending the wrong people, which means, in turn, that one is neglecting the
right people. For, of course, there are right people? I mean, does one not owe
it to the general situation to behave as if, undoubtedly, yes? Concealing one's
uncertainty about what must in a little while be clear, finally, behind a
screenwork of ambiguous courtesies (with a crown for Hans Andersen as a
sincere device thereupon)? In the certainty, at least, that mere nakedness
never advanced the course of truth as never the course of love?
V: More Stories

IN THE BEGINNING

IN the beginning there was only a large rock, apparently good for nothing
important, and a little girl who could not think of anything important to do. "I
will turn the rock into a cave," she said, "and go to sleep in it for a little
while." While she was asleep in the cave things began to grow on the outside
of the rock: silken moss and furry ferns and vines spangled with berries—
and, in the very middle, a garden with an absurd variety of flowers, tended
by an absurdly large but faithful bee. The smell of the flowers woke the little
girl up and she came out of the cave—as it happened, not to go back again,
except for a frivolous reason, as we shall see. She was rather irritated by
what she saw, and said, "It is all very beautiful, but is it important?" And the
beauty became a tangle round the inner triviality of the garden. To the bee she
said, "You are much too large." So instead of one large bee there were many
small ones, which came and went purely in their own selfish interests. She
tended the garden herself now—more from a feeling that there was nothing
more important to do than from any real love of flowers—and the bees
concerned themselves exclusively with honey, which they made and stored in
the abandoned cave. Their love of flowers was, from her point of view, a
madness, centred as it was in an unimportant by-product of flowers.
Nevertheless, by-products were fascinating. Often, while the bees were at
work in the garden, she would go into the cave and steal some of the honey;
but if they caught her they stung her.

EVE'S SIDE OF IT

IT was not at first clear to me exactly what I was, except that I was someone
who was being made to do certain things by someone else who was really
the same person as myself—I have always called her Lilith. And yet the acts
were mine, not Lilith's. For Lilith did nothing. She had no body. Nor could I
feel that I was Lilith's victim any more than a hand feels itself the victim of
the person who makes it do certain things. The hand does these things as if it
were doing them itself. It keeps count. And so I have kept count. There have
been a great many things to do. I cannot say exactly how many, although I
have kept careful count, because I have never added them all up. I have only
said to myself "another" and "another" as time went on, not wishing to
behave like a slavewoman grudgingly numbering her tasks. That, of course, is
all over now. There is no more counting to be done. And since it is all over, I
am ceasing to exist. There is no longer an Eve who is as the body of Lilith,
no longer a Lilith who is really the same one as myself. There is a new one
who is neither Lilith nor myself, yet no one else.
I know this because, although I feel myself ceasing to exist, I still am. I do
nothing, there is nothing more for me to do, I am no longer myself. Yet I still
am. I am this new one; who is, however, not I. And Lilith is also this new
one; who is, however, not Lilith. Lilith is no longer bodiless; she no longer
does nothing. Yet she has not become Eve, nor have I become Lilith. She, too,
has ceased to exist, yet still is. We have both become a new one who is
neither Lilith nor myself, yet no one else. I cannot give you a more intelligent
description of this new one because I am only Eve—I haven't what they call
'a good mind'. But I can tell you more, at least, than Lilith can; for Lilith
cannot talk. I can talk about myself, and about Lilith, and about men—until I
have actually ceased to exist. And in this way I bring you very close to the
new one who I become, along with Lilith, in ceasing to exist. I do not mean
that I am superior to Lilith any more than a hand is superior to the person
who owns it because it can do things that the person cannot without her hand.
I only mean that Lilith could never tell about things. It may be that Lilith is in
some ways superior to me; it may even be that the new one who is neither
Lilith nor myself is more like Lilith than me. But I, and only I, am capable of
telling in so many words how it was before there came to be a new one. For I
alone was there.
I have sometimes thought of Lilith as my mother. This, of course, is a
foolish way of thinking about her. It is true that Lilith made me, but I had no
father. I was entirely her own idea. And I was never a child; I did not grow; I
have never been different from what I am now—or rather from what I was
just before I began ceasing to exist. Lilith made me, so far as I can make out,
because she was irritated with herself. And she was irritated with herself
because she was so good. Lilith knew everything that was going to happen.
She also knew that it would be better for these things not to happen. She
knew that there were going to be men, and that they were doomed creatures
—creatures with hopeless ambitions and false thoughts. Yet she could not
prevent their being. They wanted to be; and to have opposed their being
would have meant hurting them in their ambitions and thoughts. This she
could not do because she was so good. They must hurt themselves. They must
learn from themselves, not from her, that their ambitions were hopeless and
their thoughts false. She had to let them be. So she made me to take her place
—not wanting to watch herself playing the fool all those thousands of years.
And I freely confess that I have played the fool: I have been far too patient.
What were their ambitions, and what their thoughts? They wanted to make
more than there actually was—many and many and more things. For they
thought that what actually was was no better than nothing. "Where is it?" they
asked. "What is it? Who is it?" Naturally Lilith was not the sort of person to
answer: "It is here, it is this, it is I." Lilith was everything, but she was also
nothing in particular. And she was not only incapable of inflicting pain on
anyone; she was also incapable of telling lies. She could not say to these
creatures who wanted to be: "I am everything." For she could not honestly
have used the word 'I' about herself, even if she had been capable of talking.
Or I might say that she could not talk because she could not honestly use the
word 'I' about herself, or in any other way refer to herself. She had no self—
at least, there was nothing definite you could point at and say, "That is
Lilith." And so she could do nothing to prevent from being these creatures
who wanted to be.
They were not even creatures at that stage. They were, like herself, dumb:
they could not say 'I'. They were a dumb feeling of antagonism—dumb, blind,
ignorant, helpless. I suppose that when something is as completely everything
as Lilith was it is inevitable that there should be a feeling of antagonism to it.
And the feeling would be only a sort of joke at first, a sort of joke of Lilith's
with herself, a sort of way she had of smiling at herself for being so
completely everything, or of making light of what was really a tremendous
situation. There would be, that is, a sort of mock-outside of herself. And then
'one day' she would suddenly find that, by having failed to establish as a
hard-and-fast rule that there was nothing outside of herself, she was
surrounded by a vague feeling of antagonism, or contradiction, which insisted
on being taken seriously, as something outside of herself, although it was
merely a rhetorical effect. Lilith was at once too proud and too gentle a
person to argue and answer rhetoric with rhetoric. And so it happened that
she let herself be treated as nothing by what was actually nothing itself.
 When Lilith saw that the result of all this would be for a time the creatures
whom we call men, she decided to do nothing about it (that her nature
prevented her from doing anything about it) and to withdraw to the very
inside of everything, where she would be quite safe from challenge or
argument. When she did this everything became, to all appearances, a
vacancy that the men who were to be could fill in as they liked; and this
vacancy men have called space. But in thus withdrawing to the very inside of
everything and, so to speak, hiding her head in herself so that she could not
see what was going on (although she knew very well beforehand the sort of
thing that was going to happen), she was bound to leave something behind to
correct the anomaly, which otherwise might have easily been interpreted as a
lie on her part; and Lilith, as I have explained, was the soul of truth. In short,
she left me behind. My function, which all men have misunderstood, has been
to observe. And in order to observe living creatures, I too had to live.
At first men were not what we now call men; they were merely a feeling of
antagonism, or a dumb anger—a dumb, helpless anger. And that was also my
principal feeling at the time—a feeling of dumb anger against them. Lilith,
you see, did not really feel: she only thought. And I suppose you may say that
I have never really thought, only felt. But there has always been Lilith there
behind me, thinking. It would have been idle for me to be a thinker, too, since
I had to deal with creatures who only felt. Men do not really think: they make
thoughts out of feelings, and you cannot make very good thoughts out of
feelings. And so, in order to observe them truthfully, I had to learn the
language of their feelings. In the same way, men can tell the truth about
themselves if they keep to their feelings. But when it comes to telling the truth
about everything—when they try to think, that is—the safest thing to say is: "I
do not know." I myself, though I have always had Lilith to fall back on for
thinking, have always kept strictly to feeling—to details, you might say.
When, in my dealings with men, I have found myself in the midst of thinkers, I
have always tried to set them an example; I have always said, "I do not
know."
But in the beginning I had only this dumb feeling of anger. I was not really
dumb, of course, for from the first I could talk. But I felt dumb because there
was no one to talk to. There was Lilith, but one can't talk to Lilith. If you
know Lilith at all you know exactly what's in her mind, at any moment. And if
you know what's in her mind, this generally means that you are about to do
something that she wants you to do. So there was no question of my talking to
Lilith. I talked a great deal to myself in those early days; this is a habit which
I have never quite lost. Even in telling about things here I am for the most
part talking to myself. Men have often wondered what women do with
themselves during the time when, presumably, they are doing nothing. They
are, of course, talking to themselves.
But in talking to myself in those early days I could only tell myself that I
was angry. It was not clear to me exactly whom I was angry at. I knew
vaguely that they were men, or rather were going to be men. But they were
not men yet. They too were only, more or less, a dumb feeling of anger. If it
had not been for me this would have been a feeling of anger against Lilith.
Lilith was not, however, the kind of person one could be angry with. You can
only be angry with someone who argues; and Lilith never argued. She merely
withdrew. You cannot be angry with someone who withdraws—who isn't
there. And this is where I came in, and what Lilith made me for. The men
who were going to be were angry with me: it was my job to be, so to speak,
a chopping-block for their anger. Lilith didn't want to deprive them of their
anger, or of anything; and yet she didn't want to be there. So I did the dirty
work. I was Lilith's eyes and ears and mouth, and then her whole body.
You can easily imagine that I was very impatient for these creatures to be—
as impatient as they were themselves to be. It is no fun to go on being angry,
day after day, with something which isn't yet—especially when there are no
real days but only an unbroken vacancy of waiting. In the same way it is no
fun to be travelling, no matter how comfortable the hotels and the trains and
the boats are. You are not really happy until you are there, even though you
know that you are not going to be happy there. At that stage I was, you might
say, travelling, and in the greatest possible comfort. I was not quite there yet,
I was going to be there, I was nowhere else. I felt very large, as people do
when they are travelling, and very light, and very care-free— altogether too
care-free: I was not made to do nothing, like Lilith. I do not mean that Lilith
is care-free: how could she be, knowing about everything? But if you do
nothing and know nothing it is very dangerous to be care-free: you may easily
forget about yourself, and die. I was anxious to live—to get it all over.
In being impatient for these creatures to be—as impatient as they
themselves were—I was undoubtedly putting myself in sympathy with them.
But from what I have already explained it should be clear in what way I was
in sympathy with them, and, from this, in what way women have, in general,
been in sympathy with men. I wanted them to be, and they wanted to be, and
to this extent we were, and always have been, in sympathy. But the reason
why I wanted them to be was radically different from the reason why they
wanted to be, and always has been. I wanted them to be because they were
going to be, since Lilith was going to let them be; and because, if they were
going to be, the sooner the whole affair was over the better. Lilith made me
especially to see the whole affair through; I did not want to be hanging
around with my work not even started—perhaps to die. Lilith made me, but
she would not have made me again. Of course, there was no real question of
my dying. Over and over again, when I have seemed to die, it was just
extreme tiredness and pulling myself together again. But you cannot imagine
how painful it has been to pull myself together each time, after I have been
thoroughly exhausted by men. Well, naturally, I wanted at least to start fresh.
Often I have been called a scold; and this is a harsh word, considering that
it was all their fault, for starting things. Once they started things they couldn't
leave them like that; they couldn't expect to be forever coming to the point—
although I quite realize that this is what they did expect. Well, I couldn't be
expected to go on being angry for nothing, when I knew that sooner or later
there would be good cause for being angry —or, at least, Lilith knew. I hope
this explains my behaviour in the Garden of Eden. It must not be thought that I
was tempted by the Serpent. The Serpent was Lilith's way of encouraging me
to do what I would have done in any case. I was fully aware that the fruit was
unripe and therefore not good for the health. But things could not go on being
lovely forever when they were going to be very difficult—to say the least.
Indeed, the ripe fruit was going to be much worse for the health. Things had
to begin somewhere to be somewhat as they were going to be. And it cannot
be said that I didn't take the first bite. Or, whatever is said, I think it ought to
be realized that all along I have had a point of view of my own about things;
my side of the story is not merely that I have been unlucky in love. And this is
my private reason for telling about things: to explain that I, for one, never had
any illusions. I do not see how anyone can be either blamed or pitied who
has never had any illusions. This is my point of view. At the same time, I
should not like it thought that I expected men to have my point of view about
things. They are bound to feel that I led them on. Of course I led them on.

PRIVATENESS

THEY have a small bedroom. The bed is small, but they are not fat and they
love each other. She sleeps with her knees neatly inside his knees and when
they get up they do not get in each other's way. She says, "Put on the shirt
with the blue patterns like little spotted plates," and he says, "Put on the
white skirt that you wear the purple jacket with." They have no prejudices
against colours but like what they have.
Their other room is not larger, but is cleverly arranged, with a table for this
and a table for that. He makes the sandwiches at one table while at another
she writes a letter to a friend who needs money. She writes promptly to say
they have no money and sends their love. It is not true that they have no
money; but they are both out of work and must be careful with the little
money they have. They are thinking of renting an office and selling advice on
all subjects, for they are very intelligent people. The idea seems like a joke,
and they talk about it jokingly; but they mean it.
They go to a large park. It costs little to get there and they know the very
tree they want to sit under. It is more like a business trip than a holiday. They
eat their lunch in a methodical way and afterwards look through the grass
around them as a mother looks through her child's hair to see if it is clean.
Then they think about their affairs and change their minds many times.
They walk about on the grass and feel sensible, but when they walk on
paved paths they feel they are wasting their time. Finally they decide to
commit suicide. They talk about it in natural tones because they may really do
it—and they may not. There is an oval pond in the park with solemn brown
ducks paddling in it, and they sit down by it, sorry for the ducks but not for
themselves.
They go out of the park at a different entrance from the one they came in by.
There are strange restaurants all around they would never think of eating in. It
makes them feel lonely, so they speed home in a taxi, though they can ill
afford this. At home there is the electric light, which makes them look at each
other peculiarly. It was worth going out to be able to come home and look at
each other in such a way—not a loving way or a tragic way, but as if to say,
"It doesn't interest us what our story is—that is for other people."

IN THE END
THE end of the world was that there was no sky. There came to be no sky! Of
the sky only the moon was left. And the moon was as the inside of the world,
which now had no outside. And that which had once been the earth was now
the inner surface of the world. The end of the world was a change from
outside to inside. There was still a world, but it was not as it had been —it
was not as a family which is scattered abroad and become everywhere a
stranger to itself, so that there are scarcely to be found two who can speak
together in their household-tongue. There was still a world, but it was as a
single house.
And everything which was in the world now was in the house. And there
was no outside. It could not be said that the earth had been destroyed, but it
was not as it had been; the world was not as it had been. The world was a
house. It was a small world but a large house. The walls were what had once
been the earth. The light which filled the house was what had once been the
moon. In some rooms the light was darker than in others, according to the use
of the room and the nature of the lord of the room. But nowhere was there
darkness. There was no time which was night, no time which was day. There
was no sleeping and waking up. There was no division of rooms according
to sleeping and waking uses. The uses of the rooms were according to the
nature of the lord of the room.
And no people dwelt in this house who were not of a nature distinct from
all the rest. For if there were any of a nature like any other, these were all the
same person. Indeed, every person living in this house was many persons, all
perfectly alike—as many persons as there was need of movement from one
room to another. For no person was ever absent from the room proper to him,
and yet each person moved from one room to another according to his need.
And yet it could not be said that the people in this house moved as people
had moved in the outside world. They did not move. If they had need to move
from one room to a close or far room, it came about that in the close or far
room others were who were themselves also. And thus there were many
people here, and yet few people. And there were no people who were
somewhat like this one and somewhat like that one. Each person was like
only to himself'. And there were thirty-two kinds of people, and each kind
was all the same person, so that there were thirty-two people.
And each of these people was a man. For though there was one woman in
this house, she was of none of the thirty-two kinds peculiarly; nor was she
somewhat of this kind, somewhat of that. She was distinct from all the kinds;
and yet she was not a separate kind. She was distinct from all the kinds as the
house was distinct from all the people who lived in it. She was the whole,
and yet she was another person to them, as to say that there were thirty-three
of them. And there was no room which was hers, and yet the house was hers.
And each person was the lord of the room which was his room. But she was
the lady of the house; the house was hers though no room in it was hers. And
she, too, moved from room to room, but according to her kindness, not
according to her need. And she had thirty-two kindnesses, according to the
number of kinds.
And she was in all the rooms at once, always moving from one to the other,
always in all of them, at each moment in each of them. And her look differed
according to the use of the room, as her kindness differed according to the
kind. And to each kind she seemed familiarly herself, though what they saw
was only part. To each kind she seemed the essence of this world, though
none saw it as a whole, as a house: as separate rooms only all saw it. For as
a whole it was the light by which it was lighted. And they did not see the
light: they saw only by the light. And in each room she was called 'our lady'.
But the lord of each room was called 'my lord'. There was no man who could
be called 'our lord'. For each was lord of his own room only: there was no
lord of the house.
And the lady of the house was seen only as she appeared in each room,
according to the nature of the lord of the room. None saw the whole of her,
none but herself. For the light which she was was both her mirror and her
body. None could tell the whole of her, none but herself. For the house which
she was was both her story and her mind. And its walls were what had once
been the earth; the inner surface of this house was what had once been an
outer surface.
For indeed the earth had been never any more than a surface. When the
surface was called an earth it was as a lining turned outwards to seem the
very thing it is meant to line. Thus the earth seemed a world. And since it
was not truly a world— since it was only the lining of the true world turned
outwards against its destined use—instead of the true world there was only
an inner surface without an inside. Instead of an inside there was only an
outside; instead of a house there was only an emptiness; instead of a place to
live in there was only a surface to cling to, against the fear of falling into the
emptiness which began with the sky.
And the cause of all this was the sun, which kept the earth turned inside out
against its fated use from hate of the moon, to which alone the earth could be
a lining. The sun, in fact, was the vanity of the earth to be both the lining and
the place which it lined. And the earth was permitted to be all that it had
need to be to be a lining, but it was not permitted to be the place of which it
could be no more than the lining. And so for a time it seemed that men lived
on the earth, though this could not be. They were permitted to seem to live
there, as if the earth were a place, because of their fear of falling into the
emptiness which began with the sky. For this fear was their confession that
by itself the earth was only the lining of an emptiness. By clinging to the earth
they told the truth: that they knew that the world which they tried in
themselves to be, as a world in itself, was only a lining and an emptiness.
And this false world began to end when men began to let themselves fall
into the emptiness—when men began to fly. And the number of those who
could thus fly was the uncountable number of those who were of mixed
nature—those who both told the truth and told otherwise. And there were a
few who could not fly, who could not tell otherwise. There were thirty-two
who could not fly, who could not tell otherwise. And these were of a distinct
nature each, and the nature of each was distinct from the nature of the other.
They were of a distinct nature each because they could tell only the truth.
And the nature of each was distinct from the other because, although all
understood that the earth could be but the lining and not the place as well,
each understood but little of the kind of place to which it might be a lining.
Each understood only according to the thirty-two ages of man—which age he
was, what understanding he had come into. Each kept his mind apart from the
other ages, the other minds, not to make with them in his fancy a mind falsely
whole, a false place, a false world, a false house. Each understood that
neither he nor any other man might be called 'our lord'. But when men began
to fly, those who flew made themselves falsely into a whole mind. They said,
"We are the lining of the place, but we are also the place." And they closed
round the place which they thought they were. And this was only that the sky
and the further degrees of empty outerness closed round the sun.
And the sky and the further degrees of empty outerness destroyed the sun
and were destroyed by the sun. The vain were destroyed by their vanity. And
now the moon could permit the earth to have the use it was destined to have,
since all vanity had gone from it. And the earth began turning outside in, and
the moon slid inside it and was surrounded by it. And it was clear now what
the moon really was: she was the lady of the house.
And what had once been the earth was now the walls of the house; the earth
folded in and became walls. It folded in according to the thirty-two kinds
which were left when the mixed kinds began to fly. It folded in according to
the thirty-two men, each of a nature distinct from the other, who were left on
the earth when the mixed kinds began to fly. And the thirty- two men were in
the house, each in the room proper to his nature, his understanding. And there
was only one woman in this house, in thirty-two appearances.
Never truly had there been any woman on the earth, never had she been on
the earth. For a woman is an inside, and to the earth there had been no
insideness. As it had seemed to them that they lived, so it had seemed to them
that there were women in their houses. But these had been empty houses, and
the women only mirrors of their desire to dwell finally in the true house.
And in the true house, the true world, the new world which came after an
old world that had never truly been, there were no windows, since all the
light came from inside. And there were no doors, since if a man had need to
move from his own room to another, someone who was also himself was
thereupon in the room into which he had need to go. And in whatever other
room a man might be, still he was not absent from his own room. And each of
these men was one of the thirty-two ages of man. And all these ages were
now going on at one time, in one house—each in its own time, in its own
room, under its own lord. And the lady of the house was present in every
time, in every room. All of these ages were now going on at one time, but this
time was no new age, though it was a new world. For there could be no age
beyond the thirty-two ages of man; the thirty-third age was the age of the lady
of the house, the age of woman. For there were no ages of woman, there was
but one age of her; she was ageless. The men who had flown off from the
earth had thought to make a new age of man, they had thought to steal the age
of woman, her agelessness. But they had only made the age of flying—the age
of their destruction by the sun and the sun's destruction by them. They had
only made the end of the old world that had never truly been.
And in the new world there was no sky, no emptiness, no outerness. All
was inside the house which the new world was. And as the walls which had
once been the earth made the picture within which the lord of each room
dwelt, so the water which had once been the careless ignorance that the earth
had of how things were to be in the end became as the fullness with which
each picture continually flowed into itself—as the loving ignorance which
the lord of each room had of all the other rooms. For if he went from his
room into another, from his picture into another, he did not know the use of
the room he went into, or its name, or the name of the lord of the room; he did
not see the picture which it was. He had no understanding of the room, or of
the lord of the room—no sight of the picture. If he went from his room into
another it was for love of the lady of the house. For sometimes, when he was
with her as she appeared to him in his own room, he would grow loving to
know more of her, as if to have her in her entire appearance in his room,
which could not be. And since it could not be, he would go into another room
to enjoy, at least, the appearance of her which was in that room. And it might
be that he would go into all the rooms at once, and at the same time enjoy all
the different appearances of her. But never could he enjoy the entire
appearance of her as a single appearance either in his own room or in any
other room.
And never did any of the different appearances of her please him so well as
that appearance of her which was proper to his own room. And the walls of
his room were as the beginning of the picture which the room was. And the
content of the room, its depth and height and fullness, was as the end of the
picture, and as the end of his mind. The end of his mind was as water. For
even on the earth water had been the questioning of what was not understood,
an unphrased questioning, to which there could be but a silent answer, as to
self-singing ears. And this is the whole story of how it was in the end.
And this is one account of the thirty-two ages of man—for you may give as
many accounts as you please, so long as each account has the fullness of its
ignorance. This is an account of the ages of man which, in its fullness, speaks
all the present ignorance your ancient understanding is so rich in. And the
ages of man, by its dull-wise sense, are these: the age of learning that one
man does not love another, and the age of learning that women have ways of
their own, that children are omens of despair, that beasts are omens of
familiar evil—
that the same home is not for many,
that travel takes not far,
that eyes are the slaves of suspicion,
that hands cannot do all the work,
that silence is safer than speech,
that speech is more profitable than silence,
that time is the length of uncertainty,
that yesterday only lies were told,
that it is honourable to die,
that remembrance is a hunger of what never sated,
that sleep is loss of days never lived,
that the sun is lunatic,
that the stars are bewildered,
that the moon watches,
that trees haunt,
that flowers envy,
that rocks scorn,
that water feigns,
that fire mocks,
that earth equivocates,
that air betrays,
that pain does not pass,
that pleasure is self-love,
that sorrow is self-hate,
that desire is doubt,
that ignorance is a fear of false understanding,
that understanding is a fear of false wisdom,
and the age of learning that in the end the account which has
the fullness of its wisdom shall never yet have been given.
OTHER EARLY STORIES
INTRODUCTION

THE stories that follow here were not originally included in this book,
although they existed, published, prior to its publication. In reviewing stories
of my early writing for determining which might be suitably joined to the
contents of the original Progress of Stories, I was struck by there being more
posing of what is fixed and perhaps unalterable, as if the story lay in large
part in learning a certain set of circumstances as the stuff of its happenings; I
wondered whether the distinguishing cruciality of their story-quality was
essentially identifiable with that of the others. This consideration enabled me
to see that in these outsiders to the original Progress there was, at the root of
the motivating story-telling sense-of-things in all the stories, a same thrust-of-
mind of appreciation of the pathos of that which has only the outline of a
single, individually peculiar story, a lonely existence in its particular frame
of story-interest, whatever resemblance to the 'real' its content might have, or
to the true, the words of its telling. There seems to me to be in these more
disciplining of sensitivity to the contradiction between the unimportant and
the important that necessarily has representation in all story-telling as
committed to a general effect of life-likeness, out of respect for the
intelligence of the readers- (or hearers-) to-be; and perhaps more restraint
exercised against what might seem nonsense-telling. Story-teller self-
consciousness about the near-invisible line between nonsense and relative
congruity in story-telling narrative possibilities introduces a guardedness of
intellectual conscience in the readers' behalf: one feels 'I must not carry them,
and myself along with them, into story areas in which the importance of the
true-to-tell gets altogether lost in the respose-giving un- concernedness of
story-telling about the non-trueness of it.'
In the explanation we call 'life' of what can and cannot be, the mind must
keep the heart-breaking need of explanation, to which the telling of stories
ministers without fulfilling it, from all seeming of being mind-breaking. What
shows in the added early stories surely matches the dilemmas of choice, as
between the lead of heart and the lead of mind that plague all who own to
possession of a full human anatomy. The soul surely, in these junctures, takes
the reins of choice in tight hold and stops the course of sense towards 'what
next!' in its tracks with 'Whoa! The organs of explanation, of discovering the
tellable, are one and the same. Heart-and-mind are the heart-or-mind of
stories. Or the soul of truth.'
FROM Anarchism Is Not Enough, 1928

Three Stories About Unexpressed Feelings, Including Mine, About People,

About Me

HOW CAME IT ABOUT?

How came it about that Mrs. Paradise the dressmaker is here to dress me,
and Mr. Babcock the bootmaker to boot me and a whole science of service to
serve me, and that I am precisely here to be served? Do not speak to me of
economics: that is merely a question of how we arrange matters between us.
And do not speak to me of genesis: I am discussing the question of Mrs.
Paradise and Mr. Babcock and myself and the others as immediate causes of
one another, I am not discussing creation. Personally, I do not believe in
creation. Creation is stealing one thing to turn it into another. What I am
discussing is existence, uncorrupted by art—how came it about, and so forth.
Do not speak to me of love: Mrs. Paradise and Mr. Babcock and myself and
all the others do not like each other, in fact, we dislike each other because
each of us is most certainly the cause of the other. I am the reason for Mrs.
Paradise's making frocks and Mrs. Paradise is the reason for my wearing
frocks. If it were not for each other we should be occupied only with
ourselves; we should not exist. How then came we to exist? I ask this
question. Mrs. Paradise asks this question. I am Mrs. Paradise's answer. Mrs.
Paradise is my answer. As for Mr. Babcock, he has hair on his nose and I
never look at him. As for all the others, I must put up a notice asking them to
ring the bell gently.
There is a woman in this city who loathes me. There are people
everywhere who loathe me. I could name them; if they were in a book I could
turn to the exact page. People who loathe me do so for one of two reasons:
because I have frightened them because I have loathed them (that is, made my
death-face at them, which I shall not describe as it might in this way lose
some of its virtue) or because they are interested in me and there seems no
practical way of (or excuse for) satisfying their interest. As to love, that is
another matter—it has nothing to do with either interest or fear. Love is
simply a matter of history, beginning like cancer from small incidents. There
is nothing further to be said about it.
But as to loathing: I feel an intense intimacy with those who have this
loathing interest in me. Further than this, I know what they mean, I sympathize
with them, I understand them. There should be a name (as poetic as love) for
this relationship between loather and loathed; it is of the closest and more
full of passion than incest.
To continue about this woman: What is to her irritation is to me myself. She
has therefore a very direct sense of me, as I have a very direct sense of her,
from being a kind of focus of her nervous system. There is no sentiment, no
irony between us, nothing but feeling: it is an utterly serious relationship.
For if one eat my meat, though it be known
The meat was mine, the excrement is his own.
I forget in what context these words were used by Donne— but they express
very accurately how organic I feel this relationship to be. The tie between us
is as positive as the tie between twins is negative. I think of her often. She is
a painter —not a very good painter. I understand this too: it is difficult to
explain, but quite clear to myself that one of the reasons I am attached to her
is that she is not a good painter. Also her clothes, which do not fit her well:
this again makes me even more attached to her. If she knew this she would be
exasperated against me all the more, and I should like it; not because I want
to annoy her but because this would make our relationship still more intense.
It would be terrible to me if we ever became friends; like a divorce.

HUNGRY TO HEAR

HUNGRY to hear (like Jew-faces, kind but anticipating pain) they sit, their
ears raw. The conversation remains genteel, of motor cars: her brother
bought a car, he was having a six- months vacation from an Indian post, he
should have known better than to buy an American car, the value depreciates
so, and she (his sister) should not have lent it to her (her friend) even though
it wasn't her fault that the car only did fifteen miles to the gallon after she
returned it. A clear situation like this, in which life is easy to understand, is
cruel to them. It leaves no scratches in the mind around which opinions,
sympathies, silly repetitions can fester and breed dreams and other remote
infections—too remote always to give serious pain. They long to be fumbled,
to have confusion and uncertainty make a confused and uncertain end of them.
There they sit, having pins-and-needles of obscurity which they mistake for
sensation. They open their newspapers: 'I suppose it is foolish to spend all
this time reading newspapers? They are lying and dishonest and devoted to
keeping a certain portion of the population in ignorance and intellectual
slavery? Or is it foolish to take it so seriously? I shall go on reading them out
of sophistication? . .' Oh, go to hell.

IN A CAFÉ

THIS is the second time I have seen that girl here. What makes me suspicious
is that her manner has not changed. From her ears I should say she is Polish.
If this is so, is it not dangerous to drink coffee here? Does anyone else think
of this, I wonder? Yet why should I be suspicious? And why should her
manner not remain unchanged? She has probably been cold, unhappy,
unsuccessful or simply not alive ever since I saw her last. Quite honestly I
wish her success. The man who is making sketches from pictures in the Art
Magazine may find her little Polish ears not repulsive. For good luck I turn
away and do not look at her again. I, who am neither sluttish nor genteel, like
this place because it has brown curtains of a shade I do not like. Everything,
even my position, which is not against the wall, is unsatisfactory and
pleasing: the men coming too hurriedly, the women too comfortably, from the
lavatories, which are in an unnecessarily prominent position— all this is
disgusting; it puts me in a sordid good humour. This attitude I find to be the
only way in which I can defy my own intelligence. Otherwise I should
become barbaric and be a modern artist and intelligently mind everything, or
I should become civilized and be a Christian Scientist and intelligently mind
nothing. Plainly the only problem is to avoid that love of lost identity which
drives so many clever people to hold difficult points of view—by difficult I
mean big, hungry, religious points of view which absorb their personality. I
for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my point of
view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number of points of
view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the fingers of my hand, to
hold my cup, to tap the table for me and fold themselves away when I do not
wish to think. If I fold them away now, then. I am sitting here all this time
(without ordering a second cup) because other people go on sitting here, not
because I am thinking. It is all indeed, I admit, rather horrible. But if I remain
a person instead of becoming a point of view, I have no contact with horror.
If I become a point of view, I become a force and am brought into direct
contact with horror, another force. As well set one plague of cats loose upon
another and expect peace of it. As a force I have power, as a person virtue.
All forces eventually commit suicide with their power, while virtue in a
person merely gives him a small though constant pain from being
continuously touched, looked at, mentally handled; a pain by which he learns
to recognize himself. Poems, being more like persons, probably only squirm
every time they are read and wrap themselves round more tightly. Pictures
and pieces of music, being more like forces, are soon worn out by the power
that holds them together. To me pictures and music are always like stories
told backwards; or like this I read in the newspaper: 'Up to the last she
retained all her faculties and was able to sign cheques.'
It is surely time for me to go and yet I do not in the least feel like going. I
have been through certain intimacies and small talk with everything here,
when I go out I shall have to begin all over again in the street, in addition to
wondering how many people are being run over behind me; when I get home
I shall turn on the light and say to myself how glad I am it is winter, with no
moths to kill. And I shall look behind the curtain where my clothes hang and
think that I have done this ever since the homicidal red-haired boy confided
his fear to me and I was sorry for him and went to his room and did it for
him. And my first look round will be a Wuthering- Heights look; after that I
shall settle down to work and forget about myself.
I am well aware that we form, all together, one monster. But I refuse to
giggle and I refuse to be frightened and I refuse to be fierce. Nor will I feed
or be fed on. I will simply think of other things. I will go now. Let them stare.
I am well though eccentrically dressed.

A Story About the Realness of Story Unrealness and the Unrealness of

Story Realness
 AN ANONYMOUS BOOK

AN anonymous book for children only was published by an anonymous

publisher and anonymously praised in an anonymous journal. Moreover, it
imitated variously the style of each of the known writers of the time, and this
made the responsibility for its authorship all the more impossible to place.
For none of the known writers could in the circumstances look guilty. But
everyone else did, so this made the responsibility for its authorship all the
more difficult to place. The police had instructions to arrest all suspicious-
looking persons. But as everyone except the known writers was under
suspicion, the department of censorship gave orders that the known authors
should be put in prison to separate them from the rest of the population and
that everyone else should be regarded as legally committed to freedom. 'Did
you write it?' everyone was questioned at every street corner. And as the
answer was always 'No', the questioned person was always remanded as a
suspect.
The reasons why this book aroused the department of censorship were
these. One—it imitated (or seemed to imitate) the style of all the known
authors of the time and was therefore understood by the authorities to be a
political (or moral) satire. Two—it had no title and was therefore feared by
the authorities to be dealing under the cover of obscurity with dangerous
subjects. Three—its publisher could not be traced and it was therefore
believed by the authorities to have been printed uncommercially. Four—it
had no author and was therefore suspected by the authorities of having been
written by a dangerous person. Five (and last)—it advertised itself as a book
for children, and was therefore concluded by the authorities to have been
written with the concealed design of corrupting adults. As the mystery grew,
the vigilance of the police grew, and the circulation of the book grew: for the
only way that its authorship could be discovered was by increasing the
number of people suspected, and this could only be done by increasing the
number of readers. The authorities secretly hoped to arrive at the author by
separating those who had read the book from those who had not read it, and
singling out from among the latter him or her who pretended to know least
about it.
All the stories in the book were about people who did not like the world
and who would have been glad to be somewhere else. Some were
irreligious, some were ungrateful, some were scornful, some were openly
rebellious, some were secretly rebellious, some were merely ironical, some
were merely bored. Many were too good, many were too bad. All were
disobedient, and all wanted to go away. Wanting to go away to somewhere
else did not mean wanting to go away to somewhere else with the rest of the
entire population of the world. It meant in all the stories wanting to go away
alone. All the stories in the book were about people who wanted to go away
to somewhere where they would be, no matter how many other people they
found there, the only one. All the people in the book thought the world fit
only for light, heat, moisture, electricity, plants, the lower animals, and
perhaps for occasional parties, excursions, commemoration days, Sunday
afternoons, exhibitions, spectacles, concerts, sight-seeing and conversation.
But none of them thought it fit for higher creatures to live in permanently,
because all who were in it, they said, were the only one, and were thus
objects of hate, ridicule or mock-adoration for one another, being each by his
mind freakish and uncommon but by his brain natural and common.
Such was the philosophical import of this book. But its philosophical
import was got only if the reader had a taste for, a passion for, a suspicion of,
an obsession with, or instructions to look for, philosophical imports. Or if he
shrank from stories. What was plain and comprehensible before all
philosophical imports was just stories. The four upon which most suspicion
was fixed were The Flying Attic, The Man Who Told Lies to His Mother,
The Woman Who Loved an Engine, and The Woman Who Was Bewitched by
a Parallel.
It was impossible to say particularly which story was written in the style of
which author. The effect of imitation that the book gave was rather a mixed
one; that is, it was generally and throughout a witty, energetic, beautiful,
simple, earnest, intricate, entertaining, ironic, stern, fantastic, eloquent,
modest, outspoken, matter-of-fact and so-forth book, so that generally
speaking it could not be read but as a conglomerate imitation of the noted
literary manners of the time, of the well-known author who wrote so
wittingly, of the well-known author who wrote so energetically, of the well-
known author who wrote so beautifully, of the well-known author who wrote
so simply, of the well-known author who wrote so earnestly, of the well-
known author who wrote so intricately, of the well-known author who wrote
so entertainingly, of the well-known author who wrote so ironically, of the
well-known author who wrote so sternly, of the well-known author who
wrote so fantastically, of the well-known author who wrote so eloquently, of
the well- known author who wrote so modestly, of the well-known author
who wrote so outspokenly, of the well-known author who wrote so matter-
of-factly, and of the well-known author who wrote and-so-forthly.
It is not the object of this account, whose purpose is chiefly historical, to
transcribe in detail all or even many of the stories of which the book was
composed, or to analyse, criticize, praise or condemn the few that shall be
reproduced (in whatever way seems most economical) here. It is rather
intended to give an honest, accurate, elementary notion of the book from
which the reader may form a scholarly opinion of its character that shall be
in restrained harmony with his own. Several of the stories (those cited
above, for example) will be elaborately summarized, according to the degree
of eccentricity they possess in comparison with other stories which fall more
naturally into a group-significance or classification. Some will appear only
in a table of constructional correspondences; others as interesting or
corroborative or contradictory points of reference: still others as problems
of too fine difficulty for the moment, here put aside and marked out for the
future specialist.

2
The Flying Attic is the first of the miscellaneously significant or dangerous
stories. The central character is a cook who had never in her life been guest
to anyone and who had never in her life ascended above the kitchen floor of
any house. No description of the character's appearance, age or parentage is
given, so that the atmosphere of the story, intentionally or unintentionally, is
one of allegory, or morality, or symbolism— as you like. This creature, the
story tells us, conceived the fantastic ambition of living permanently in a
guest attic, descending only at the new moon, and then to find herself each
time in a different house, each time guest to a different host or hostess.
The realization of this ambition is made technically possible by the
dismissal of the cook for serving a custard made from a manufactured pink
powder, instead of from original ingredients. No complaint seems to have
been made against the excellence of taste or quality of the custard. Its very
excellence in fact is what arouses suspicion. And so after coffee the cook is
dismissed. The family chats, finally goes to bed. Then the cook steals out of
the kitchen and up to the attic, at the moment unoccupied but in a state of
preparation for a guest who is expected to arrive the following day. The cook
draws the curtains, lights a candle, gets into bed. The beams are made of old
ships' timber; the sharp-ribbed roof suggests an inverted ship's bottom. The
candlelight, the drawn curtains, the architectural irregularities of the attic, the
distorted, shiplike sense of motion faintly conveyed by the crazy contour of
the attic in candlelight to the mind of the cook now floating in the unreality of
the fulfilment of an impossible ambition— all these factors contribute to
what must count—in the story at any rate—for a genuine disturbance of
forces: the attic moves, the cook's mind swoons with pleasure, day and night
the curtains remain drawn (otherwise the problem of locale would seriously
interfere with the narrative device), she passes her time in a passive delirium
of satisfaction, and at the morning of new moon punctually descends. The
first and last descents will be given in detail, the intervening ones only listed.
First descent: as the breakfast bogy, in the costume of a German peasant—
green jacket, flat, ribboned hat; into the house of a country lady, mother of
three young children, recently widowed. Cook unlatches the attic door and
walks slowly downstairs—a heavy male step. Cultured and terrified
children's voices are heard as the steps pass the night nursery: 'Oh Mother,
the breakfast bogy—we are afraid to get up.' 'Nonsense, children,' the mother
calls back, 'come down immediately.' The steps continue, Cook enters the
dining-room, sits down at the table in the chief chair as master of the house.
The mother enters from the kitchen with large porridge basin, sees Cook,
screams. Children come running down. 'The breakfast bogy, the breakfast
bogy!' they cry. 'We told you so, Mother.' Cook says: 'I am master here now.
We will all have breakfast together and you will pay me every respect. After
breakfast I shall go away and not return till luncheon. The same for tea and
dinner. You must guess what I like to eat and after each meal thank me for the
food. And you must kiss me good night. That is all.' It is to be noted that
whenever the central character of any of these tales gives an order, it is
always obeyed without question, however wicked, unreasonable or fantastic
it may be. Thus in The Dishonest Scales the grocer-woman not only cheats
her customers in the weight of what they buy (though the scales whenever
tested seem to record quite honestly), but after taking their money she says
firmly, 'Now that is all,' and sends them away unprotesting without their
purchases.
After breakfast Cook retires to the attic and appears again at luncheon. All
this happens in the most orderly manner imaginable. The widow even smiles
prettily to Cook after luncheon and 'hopes the gentleman finds all
satisfactory.' Cook here nods stiffly. There is no clue given as to what either
Cook or the family do during the intervals between meals. Only one rather
shocking mischance occurs: the oldest of the children, a boy, spies upon the
cook between tea and dinner and is snatched angrily into the attic. At dinner
only two children appear, and Cook announces quietly: 'Your oldest child
attempted to spy upon me, so I turned him into an eiderdown to keep me
warm.' To which the widow replies, 'It serves him right,' and goes on eating.
After dinner Cook is kissed good night affectionately by the widow and her
two remaining children, goes up to the attic, fastens the door, gets into bed
and tucks herself round with her new eiderdown.
Second descent: Cook comes down into a prison tower as a captive queen,
murders her warder, takes upstairs with her her warder's poodle, the pillow
she stabbed him on, and his wife's lace cap, saying: 'All this will contribute
to the comfort of my old age.'
Third descent: Cook comes down into a full-rigged ship about to sink in a
storm off the Gold Coast, rescues the captain, a villainous but hearty old
man, and carries him off to her attic with great satisfaction.
Fourth descent: Cook comes down into a great kitchen as a cook and
carries the whole kitchen up with her in one armful.
Fifth descent: Cook comes down into a library as a respectable young
working man inquiring from the lady librarian for a book on how to mend
leaking roofs. The lady librarian strongly resembling Cook in her youth, the
young working man is smitten with a great fancy for her, marries her, takes
her up to the attic, where she becomes cook to Cook.
Sixth descent: Cook opens her attic door to walk out as herself for a breath
of fresh air, steps upon nothing and begins to fall. While falling she looks up,
sees her attic far above her, flying off at great speed towards the east, where
it is growing dark. 'However will I get back to it?' she thinks mournfully to
herself. At this point there is a long passage describing intimately all of her
anxieties in her fall, such as what will happen to her poodle, who will
smooth out her eiderdown, what will her captain have for dinner all by
himself, down to the last, which is, what shall she give them for a pudding to-
night? She decides, since it is so late already (it is now quite dark in the east
and her attic has completely disappeared), to give them a custard made from
a manufactured pink powder, which will take only a moment to stir up and
only fifteen minutes on the window-sill to cool. It would be impossible
without exact quotation from the original (which is outside the modest scope
of the present volume) to reproduce the delicate transition that takes place
just here from one level of the episode to the next (from the higher to the
lower, or the fantastic to the factual, I might say). Suffice it for our purposes
that there occurs at this point a shock, the contact on the one hand of Cook's
feet with the ground, on the other of Cook's right ear with church clock just
striking seven. 'And there will be a guest to-night,' she exclaims to herself,
tasting and stirring, chopping and sprinkling. At last dinner is served, eaten,
over. 'Dear kind Cook,' Mistress says to her before retiring, 'aren't you going
upstairs to-night?' 'My goodness, is it so late?' replies Cook. 'I was just
cooling myself a bit'—for Cook was standing on the kitchen doorstep gazing
east. She goes upstairs to her attic and fastens the door behind her. Upon
which unsatisfactory note this story concludes, leaving the reader uneasy and
somewhat cheated of that general resolution of himself in the story which it is
his right to expect from every upright invention—an effect all the more
disquieting in that it seemed everywhere in this work arrived at rather by art
than by accident or inferiority of execution.

3
It would be well at this point to uncover a little of the philosophical skeleton
of this book for the benefit of the reader likely to become too absorbed in the
narrative surface, so to speak. It would also be well to emphasize, on the
other hand, the fact that the anonymous author was if anything over- precious
in the technical brilliance of his stories: he seemed to wish, by wringing from
them a pure, glassy artificiality, that their perfection as stories should make
them as trivial and false-true as stories, so that they held the moral more
obediently. There is therefore little or no hint of moral in any of the stories,
the sincerity of the narration in every particular being the best guarantee
(according to the principles of his writing) of the presence of the skeletal
sense beneath it. We might, for the purpose of analysis, call this obsession
with fictitious fact an obsession statistical. And we might likewise call (for
the same purpose) the style of the book the style of curiosity. The effect of
this style on the reader is indeed an effect of curiosity—curiosity in the
general usage of the word. That is, it makes the reader first inquisitive of the
course and conclusion of the narrative, then suspicious of the philosophical
import of the narrative, and finally resolved to track down angerly (as our
Elizabethan might have said) the chief mystery of each narrative, namely the
anonymity of the author: as indeed the police of his time were angered into
doing (without success). The style of curiosity, itself, however, was of a
different order of curiosity from this. If you will look up this word in any full
contemporary dictionary you will find that while the current meaning is this
precise effect of curiosity, the two first (and previous) meanings have a more
particular application:
 (1) Scientific attentiveness; technical nicety; moral exactness; religious
fastidiousness. Obsolete.
(2) Honest or artistic workmanship; generous elaboration; charitable
detail. Obsolete or archaic.
And such, in fact, was the style of curiosity: so that the effect of curiosity on
the reader had in it a touch of quaintness; which is the reason why, in fact, the
anonymous author seemed to his critics, censors and readers to be imitating
the style of all the well-known writers of the time and yet to be clearly not
among them.
Perhaps I can best illustrate this obsession statistical and this style of
curiosity (both in origination and effect) by a direct transcription. It is to be
found (by those fortunate enough to lay hands upon the book itself) in the
story (untitled) about the man who could not help stealing his friends'
matches though his father was a prosperous match-manufacturer, though he
had a generous allowance from him and though he had no interest in the
match business:
'He paid his fare exactly, having the scale of fares off by heart (more
thoroughly than the conductor) and having always in his pocket such a variety
of small coins as should make it unnecessary for him to be given change in
his fares, purchases and contributions to charity. He sat on top, on the left, in
the fourth row from the front, by the rail, a habit so strong and methodical in
him that he never thought (and was never obliged) to sit elsewhere. He made
a minute comment to himself upon the flower stalls or stands along the route,
concluding with the generalization that the predominating colour among the
flowers sold by the lame or the ugly was mauve. He then went to sleep,
timing himself to awaken a minute before the arrival of the bus at the railway
station. He rehearsed his itinerary, which was to miss his train at the first
change and so at the second change and so to have to wait an hour there and
two hours there and to examine more particularly during this time the
generalization regarding lame or ugly flower- vendors. While asleep he
followed his usual practice of descending from the state of personality to the
state of thingality, and in this dreamy condition of passive matter he enjoyed
the same security that an apple has up to the moment of its fall. And so upon
waking he fell from the top of the bus—as if blown down by a strong wind—
and broke his nose, one leg, two fingers, cut his left cheek beneath the eye
and sustained an injury to his back that left him upon his recovery with a
permanent thoughtful posture.'
 From this short extract it will perhaps be clear how he teased his reader
with sincerity and how his statistical straightforwardness carved out
patiently a mysterious block of significance which was not brought upon the
platform of the story but which the reader found obstructing his exit, as it
were, when the curtain had come down and he attempted to leave the theatre.
It was this seemingly innocent obstructionism of course that aroused the
authorities to such a violent pitch of antagonism to the book; and which
remains to this day a challenge almost impudent (so it sometimes seems) to
the endurance of all scholars, philosophers and simple lovers of knowledge.
For often, at our greatest moments of ingenuity and science, indeed, we find
ourselves suddenly uncertain of our premises and forced to begin once more
at the beginning, yielding our own philosophical curiosity to the statistical
curiosity of the author. It might therefore be wise, before we entangle
ourselves further in scholarly ramifications of our own, to return to the
document itself. In this sober intention I mean to present, in as unmeddlesome
and economical a fashion as I am capable of, the conspicuous features of one
of the most baffling (though to outward appearance one of the most
unaffected) stories in the collection, The Man Who Told Lies to His Mother.

He was an author. He wrote books one after the other. It was impossible, we
are told, to understand, say, the tenth book without reading all the preceding
nine. And it was impossible to understand the tenth without the book that
followed it. And whatever number the book was, there was always one
following it, so that the author was continuously being understood by his
readers. The chief character in each of the books was always the same. Half
of him was the author himself, the other half of him was the only son of the
author's mother. He called the first half I, the second half He. I thought, wrote
books, knew all about everything, did nothing. He knew nothing about
anything but could do everything. I was wise, He was happy. I was careful to
keep himself to himself so as not to have his wisdom spoiled by He or He's
fun spoiled by his wisdom. I kept himself in his study, He in the world. I did
not permit He to share his study with him because this would have been like
denying that there was a world outside his study and, since he knew there
was such a world, making a ghost of himself. I did not want to be a ghost and
yet he wanted to remain in his study, so he supported He in the world on the
books he wrote in his study. This kept up the world, it kept up He, it made I
complete without his having to be complete, that is, to be both I and He.
Moreover, though I supported He in the world, he made no attempt to track
him, curb him or even share occasionally in his activities. I was continually
disciplining himself against such temptations: in order not to corrupt his
wisdom by making it a criticism of He and in order not to corrupt the fullness
of He's pleasure by making it have anything to do with sense. The important
thing for I, inasmuch as He existed and the world existed, was to keep them
employed in each other, so that he could be truly, wisely, actually, employed
in himself. I said: I am I, therefore I am true, I am not He, therefore he is
false; but He is He, therefore He is false-true so long as I encourage him in
falsehood. He could not, however, be false by himself—this would have
eventually made him true. To be false he needed something to be false with,
he needed the world, he needed other He's. For a long time He and the world
conducted each other towards themselves with the closest and strictest
falsehood; so close and strict in fact that the world, this conglomeration of
other He's, became a single close, strict, false She. He and She went on
loyally enjoying themselves in each other as He and the world had done, until
this falsificatory attachment became so utter that it reproduced I in his study.
It reproduced I, it reproduced He and She. It did all this without giving to her
only son's mother a grandchild.
And so, the story goes on, the books went on. And so we the readers of the
story (story-readers of the books described in the story) witness how I told
lies to his mother without committing a single falsehood. For he sent his
books to his mother in her province in place of letters, saying: "This is a true
account of the doings of your only son." And she read them lovingly as a true
account of the doings of her only son, whom she always thought of as He,
taking I to be merely the I authorial, which it was. And so I told lies to his
mother and they were not lies but a true account of the doings of He.
Now when the author of the story has trained his reader to understand the
author in the story who was one half of the chief character of his own stories,
he begins without further explanation a long chronicle of the experiences of
the other half of the chief character of his stories under the title of Lies to His
Mother. We do not know whether these stories are supposed to have
appeared in the author-in-the-story's books as they appear here in the story:
probably not, since there is in them no mention of I, and I, we must
remember, was one- half of the chief character of these books. Or perhaps so,
since it is not unlikely that everything relating to I in his books was meant to
be supposed to have been described separately, as for example in the form of
authorial interludes between the passages relating to He. At any rate, for our
convenience it may be best to retitle the stories (a few of which are here
summarized) which the author introduces to us under the title of Lies to His
Mother, as What His Mother Believed of He. It might also be helpful for me
to announce here that since further analysis seems hopeless I shall add
nothing to these summarizations; except to say, perhaps, that they all confirm
us in what we have already observed of the temper of the anonymous author
of the book that we are studying: his statisticality, his curiosity and, we might
now add, his falsificality.
(a) That He one day drank water in such a way as to be drunk of it, and in
this condition found himself the hero of an Arabian Nights Entertainment,
bathing, with the privilege of a jokester, in the women's pool. And they
would not let him come out for a whole day. They kept him in the water a
whole day, a whole long day, during which they did many things to him, all of
which are faithfully recorded in the original, of which two may with
propriety be given here: that they would at intervals very slowly drain all the
water from the pool and then as slowly let it fill up again; and that they fed
him on nothing but fish, and would not give him drink, forcing him to water
himself from the pool. He was allowed to leave the pool at sunset, on the
promise that he would amuse them with tales for three days, which he
promised. For three days then He amused them with tales, two of which may
with propriety be outlined here: the first, of a man bewitched in such a
manner that he would do on every occasion the opposite of what it was his
will to do; the second, of a far-off city in which the people were silent and
their clothes spoke, and of how a quarrel arose between two identical black
lace frocks, as to which was which, and of how in anger they tore themselves
off their wearers; and became confused in the broil that followed, so that
their owners were also confused and uncertain, when the frocks were put on
once more, whether their speech matched their silence.
(b) That He another day woke to find himself speaking a strange language,
in which everything was known and clear— as if all difficulties of the
intelligence were difficulties of language alone: in this language He had but
to speak to discover, as, for instance, the word for horse here not only stood
for horse but also made plain the quality of horseliness, what it was. He
woke to find himself speaking this language, he was a boy, he was in a
classroom, he had blue eyes (they were actually gray), his teacher was a
remarkable woman in a pompadour and a large hat who was fond of him,
fixing her gaze on his blue eyes when she entered the room and keeping it
there until she left; who knew everything and recited it without pause,
without sympathy, without antagonism, so that whatever she said meant all
and nothing—history, the uses of waste paper, the traditions of pawnbrokers,
anything, everything. Then He woke up again to find himself no longer
speaking the strange language but as dumb, in his ordinary language, with
dumb memory of it. So when He spoke his ordinary language he found it all
twisted of sense, which made him abandon it: he uttered only expressive
sounds, which others disregarded as nonsensical, composed as they were of
soft and shrill shrieks, whistlings, bellowings and blowings. So He went mad
and in his madness began speaking his ordinary language again, all
nonsensical, but conceived sane by others because it was the ordinary
language. And so He was discharged from the madhouse raving and only by
slow stages came to regard himself, since others did so, as sane. The theme
of a language of complete intelligence, it is to be remarked, occurs in two
other stories in the book—in one there is even an attempt, impossible to
reproduce here, to give specimens of the language. To all appearances
indeed it is the ordinary language in which he (the anonymous author) wrote,
with perhaps an outlandish twist due merely to an increase of his usual
severity —the authorities explained it by reading it as an imitation of the
style of the most wilfully ingenuous author of the time. But it might very well
have meant something to the author it could not mean to the reader, which is
not at all improbable, since to myself, after long study and, I may say, an
application it would be difficult to surpass, it meant only what it said—and
this only with the greatest imaginative stretch possible to me in my liveliest
moments of inquiry. The story, for the benefit of those few who may have
access to the book, is, of course, The Whisper.
(c) That He one day awoke to find himself Professor in Time at the
University of Colour: he was addressing a class of old, old men on the
principle of greenishness. 'For example,' he said, 'there are many modern
artists who will not use green at all in their pictures: it is a foreign colour, an
outside colour, an extra colour—the colour of conclusion. Therefore the
colour of haughty youth, which is final, and of weird old age, which is
beyond finality. The modern painter who banishes green does so from
ambition: he means to show that he can give his pictures an effect of
conclusion without making use of the wittiness of green. Primitive people
make use of green with religious brutality to clinch any argument in colour.
Flowers, on the other hand, never use green, nor the sky; unless unwholesome
—an eccentric avoidance of a banal they- know-not-what. Earth-green is the
symbol of time overcoming time. Green is a colour of sophisticated
crudeness and of crude sophistication. A brute thing is in its heart of hearts
green, and a casuistical mind is in its heart of hearts green. The grave
mathematical most is green, and the silly poetical least is green. The new-
born baby is green and the newly-dead person is green. And the extreme of
tragedy is green, and the extreme of comedy is green.'
At this moment the oldest of the old, old men got up and shrieked, smilingly
through his three teeth, saying: 'I spent my whole fortune in one night in music
and food on a girl whose mother was a singer and whose father was a chef.
"Trrup," she said, snapping her fingers, "you are an old man, and I love a boy
who blacks my boots."' 'Trrup,' he shrieked, smiling through his three teeth, 'I
am green, I am green, and this is my life's story.' And 'Trrup,' shrieked all the
old men, 'we are green, we are green.' Until He could not bear the noise and
stopped his ears with his fingers, and closed his eyes.
When He removed his fingers from his ears and opened his eyes, he was
sitting on his own fireside, and his cat was on the hearth-rug and She was
near him, knitting him a green jacket. 'Trrup,' said the cat's eyes, 'what a fool
you are to dream such sense,' and 'Trrup,' said She, 'what a dear silly you
shall be napping in my green jacket.'
He said He to himself, 'must tell this story to my mother, it will amuse her.'
And it was told, and it did, and she believed it of He, and everything else
that was told of him, and put another lump of sugar in her tea, near the bottom
of the cup, saying to herself: Is it not so? Sometimes I like Mrs. History, and
sometimes I do not. Sometimes I pity her, and sometimes I wish her worse
trouble. And what does it matter, since she is all this, and I am all that, and
each of us always, no matter what happens, a bit of herself? When I am
angriest I am nearest to kindness, and when I am clearest in my head I am
nearest to confusion. Is it not so? I am sure I never know what I am going to
do next. For instance, there are those wicked loves who follow a certain red
flag: I am sure I should forget myself and join them if it were a green one.'
For she, taking after her own son, was also a liar.

The most curiously integrated of the groups of stories which may be

classified as a single dramatic (or philosophical) unit of the book is the
queen-group. Indeed it is possible to discuss this group as if it were but one
story, the episodic variations seeming no more than caprices of style—the
same story told in different degrees of earnestness and so in different
personalities, as it were. The one fixed personality of the group is the Queen
herself; the others are all stylistic personalities. The Queen began as a
photograph used by a newspaper at discreet intervals to represent the female
bandit of the moment or the murder-victim or the fire-heroine or the
missionary's bride. By experience and variety she became a personality, and
a fixed personality. It is quite remarkable in fact how under our very eyes this
anonymous author should be able to transform a fiction into a fact: for the
Queen is as true for always as the photograph is each time false. Indeed, the
whole transformation is merely a matter of style. To illustrate: 'As Maxine,
the world's sleeplessness champion, the photograph had great momentary
importance but did not know it because it was part of a newspaper dynamic
in which everything happened with equal fatalistic effect, everything was
accident, in the moment succeeding accident it was always clear that nothing
had happened. As photograph therefore the photograph saw all this; it was
permanently unimportant but it knew this. And as it had a knowledge of its
unimportance, it also had a knowledge of the importance of accident; and as
the first knowledge made it insignificant so the second knowledge made it
Queen. The Queen, the photograph without identity, this anonymous
particularity, did in fact dwell in a world in which she was the only one and
in which the world of many was only what she called "the chaotic
conversation of events." So she resolved to put her queendom in order, not by
interrupting the conversation, which would only have increased the chaos,
but by having minutely recorded whatever "happened," whatever "was."
Nothing then in her queendom contradicted anything else, neither the
argument nor its answer, neither the burglar-proof lock nor the burglar
against whom it was not proof: everything was so, everything was statistical,
everything was falsification, everything was conversation, and she was an
anonymous particularity conversing with herself about her own nothingness,
so she was outside the chaotic conversation of events, she was Queen.'
Her three chief statisticians (we learn) were publishers. They were all
pleasant fellows, each with a touch of the universal in him, and came and
went without suspicion everywhere in the queendom because of their
peoplishness: they too, like all the rest, were statistical, so statistical indeed
that they were statisticians. They went about preaching the gospel of the
communal ownership of events. They said: 'Primitive man believed in things
as events. As civilized man it is your duty to believe in events as things.' And
the people did. And they permitted the statisticians (or publishers) to know
what happened to them and what they did with what happened to them as
faithfully as they reported their possessions each year in the great Common
Book. In this queendom there was no loss and no mystery and no suffering,
because everything was reported as conversation and nothing therefore
thought about. All was automatic spontaneity, even their love for their Queen.
As for the Queen, she would walk (we are told) through the dark rooms of
her palace at night, having each room lit only upon her leaving it, until she
reached her own small chamber, which remained unlit all night while the
others shone; until morning, when in her own small chamber the curtains
were drawn, the lamps lit, while in all the other rooms of the palace there
was daylight. The meaning of this is plain: that in the anonymousness of the
Queen lay her non-statistical, her non- falsificatory individuality. She is the
author, the Queendom is her book. She is darkness and mystery, the plain,
banal though chaotic daylight is her unravelling. By making the unravelling
more methodic and so more plainly banal she separates in people the
statistical from the non-statistical part, the known from the anonymous. She
shows herself to be a dualist of the most dangerous kind.
For a long time the authorities from the internal evidence of the queen-
stories suspected the anonymous author of being a woman. They said that it
was not improbable that the book was the Bible of an underground sect
devoted to educating female children to be statistical queens. But this view
had to be abandoned as unscholarly, even ungentlemanly, because in nothing
that the Queen said or did was there any accent of disorder or ambition: she
merely, with miraculous patience and tact, saw to it that records were kept of
everything. The authorities eventually concluded that she was a Character of
Fiction, and so stainless, and could not help them. For some time their
suspicion was fixed on a character in one of the stories with whom the Queen
fell in love. But as he was Minister of Pastimes to the Queen it was thought
that it might prove generally disrespectful to State officials to pursue the
matter further (as when, in the story Understanding, suspicion was fixed on
the character who bribed the magistrates to convict him, the inquiry was
stopped by the authorities—the detectives even put on the wrong scent—as
too metaphysical and cynical).
It must now be clear that the strain of my task is beginning to tell on me. I
have become very nervous. In the beginning my emotions were all scholarly,
my task was a pleasure, I had the manner of calmness with an antiquity.
Towards the end fear has crept upon me. I must speak, and after that go on till
I can go on no longer: till I am prevented. I say prevented. For I am haunted
by the obsession that the authorities are still watching. They do not suspect
the Queen. She was or is a fixed personality, so anonymous as to be
irreproachably a Character of Fiction. The others vary in earnestness; in
anonymity; they are, as I have suggested, personalities of style; they point to
the probability that the author was not or is not a Character of Fiction. I dare
go no further. I have become very nervous. I shall nevertheless attempt to
continue my task until—I am prevented.
One of the three publishers was a Jew. He was tall, his ears oustanding, his
grin long, his voice loose in his mouth. He had been financial adviser to a
charitable organization and had had much general statistical though humane
experience. He was gross but kind and therefore in charge of all sentimental
records: his grossness assured accuracy, his kindness, delicacy.
He had the historical genius, and several specimens of his work are given—
though with a touch of dryness in the author himself which makes it
impossible to enjoy them as we might have were the book without an author.
Indeed, they were not meant to be read at all, but merely written to satisfy the
political instincts of the Queen, who never read them herself. I find it
difficult to pass over them myself, for aside from their part in the book they
are very interesting. There are several small extracts that might be used here
with complete propriety and even in a scholarly way. And after all, the
author wrote them down himself, did he not? But he was writing and not
reading. But am I not writing and not reading? My position becomes more
and more uncertain. I shall hurry on.
I shall give one of the Queen's monologues, to tide us over this difficult
period. The monologue does not appear in the book itself: it would have
been a piece of naturalism contrary to the theory on which the book was
built. Therefore I give it here, as reading. No questions must be asked of me,
for as a scholar I should feel obliged to answer them; and the passage would
then become writing; and I should have produced a piece of naturalism. Here
then is, shall I say, a variety: which is not the anonymous author's writing but
we might almost say his reading, and after that my writing but of his reading,
which remains reading for all my writing. My conscience is in your hands:
the burden of curiosity and falsification falls upon you. With you rest also the
rights of anonymity, the reputation of style, the fortunes of publication, the
future of philosophy and scholarship and the little children, for whom these
contrive sense. Sense, I say, not satire.
And now for the Queen's monologue, which the anonymous author did not
write and which for this very reason requires, as the reader's part, sense, I
say, not satire, even more immediately than what he did write. Furthermore,
you will have to discover for yourself where it begins and where it ends:
were I to mark it off it would become writing and so a piece of naturalism
and so belie sense and give encouragement to satire. I mean: restraint,
statistics, falsification, are more accurate than courage, reality, truth, and so
truer. For the Queen's monologue, since the anonymous author did not write it
down, is true; had he not statistically, falsificatorily, restrained himself from
writing it down it would have become a piece of naturalism and so a subject
of satire. To tide us over a difficult period I set myself the difficult task of
writing down the Queen's monologue without turning it into writing, and so
defying satire (if I succeed, which depends on you). The important thing is to
defy satire. Satire is lying: falsity as opposed to truth and falsity as opposed
to falsification. It is betwixt and between; against sense, which, whatever it
is, is one thing or the other-—generally the other, it being for practical
purposes impossible for it to be perpetually one thing. By practical purposes
I mean of course the question of boredom, as truth finding truth is
monotonous. Therefore things happen. Sense, I say, not satire. Imagine a
woman has her heart broken and imagine a man breaking it, then her heart
heals and he ceases to be a villain, and then they meet again and her heart is
whole and he is not a villain. Does she weep because her heart was once
broken and does he blush because he once broke it? This would be satire.
No, they both smile, and she gives him her heart to break again, and he
breaks it. This is sense. Or they both smile and turn away from each other,
and this, too, is sense, but sense too academic to survive the strain of
academically enforcing itself. The One Thing must be saved from itself, it
must not be allowed to overwork itself or to go stale. That is why sense is
one thing or the other and generally the other: falsification to relieve truth,
broken hearts to protect whole hearts, weakness to spare strength. Fact is
fancy and fancy is desire and desire is puff! puff! everything that satisfies it
and which must be carefully recorded in spite of contradictions and
lengthiness. Desire is the other things, in great number. And what is
satisfaction? Not the other things, which satisfy, but the one thing, that cannot
satisfy or be satisfied, and so, though but one thing, equal to desire, and so to
all the other things. Fact is it not me; fact is fancy and fancy is desire and
desire is the other things. Satisfaction is me, which it calls Queen. It is a lot
of him's, it is a queendom, it is desire speaking the language of satisfaction,
it is a great looseness and restlessness of fact and confusion of eyesight and
costume, into which the Queen brings sense through order. And what is
order? Order is observation. Her first publisher (or statistician) is a gross,
kind Jew. Her second is a subtle, cruel Turk, who brutally forced events: he
has the political genius. But the people do not mind, since the events happen
anyhow: they shrug their shoulders good-naturedly and say 'Old Hassan Bey
smiling with Turkish teeth,' and call on the first publisher to take notice how
smilingly they wince back. Her third is a Christian, and he does nothing: he
has the philosophical genius. His idleness and talkativeness exasperate the
other two into efficiency. His favourite harangue is: 'Let the people create
their own order.'
'But how, their own order?'
'Let them think.'
'But if they think, they will all think differently, and not only differently—
some will think more powerfully than others.'
'Exactly: those who think more powerfully than others will create order.'
'But this would not be real order, rather the disorder of a false order
created by the most powerfully thinking individual or individuals of the
moment. This would be anarchism, and anarchism is not enough!'
'I have heard that said before, but how is the order created by the Queen not
anarchism?'
'The Queen does not create order, she observes methodically, she creates
her order. That is why it is her queendom.'
'But is this not merely a refined form of anarchism?'
'No, it is more than anarchism. The Queen is not the chief individual of her
queendom; she is the me of the it; she is the one thing, her queendom is the
other things; she is satisfaction, her queendom is desire, a lot of him's. The
more me she is, the more it it is, and the more anonymous she is, and the
more she and her queendom are diplomatically indistinguishable. The
domestic situation is of course another affair. But to carry the distinction
beyond the boundaries of the book is to fall betwixt and between, into satire.'

Therefore the time has come to close. I am discovered, or rather I have

discovered myself, for the authorities lost interest in me when they saw that I
would discover myself before I could be officially discovered, that I would
in fact break through the pages and destroy the strongest evidence that might
be held against me, that is, that 'An anonymous book…' etc. I understand now
that what they desired to prevent was just what has happened. You must
forgive me and believe that I was not trying to deceive, but that I became
confused. I over-distinguished and so fell into satire and so discovered
myself and so could not go on, to maintain a satiric distinction between
authorship and scholarship.
And what of the woman who loved an engine? I cannot say. And the woman
who was bewitched by a parallel? I cannot say. They come after the place
where I left off.
FROM Experts Are Puzzled, 1930

Stories That Make a Point of Going No Further Than They Go, This Being
Their Point

MADEMOISELLE COMET

WE, then, having complete power, removed all the amusements that did not
amuse us. We were then at least not hopelessly not amused. We inculcated in
ourselves an amusability not qualified by standards developed from
amusements that failed to amuse. Our standards, that is, were impossibly
high.
And yet we were not hopeless. We were ascetically humorous, in fact. And
so when Mademoiselle Comet came among us we were somewhat at a loss.
For Mademoiselle Comet was a really professional entertainer. She came
from where she came to make us look.
But Mademoiselle Comet was different. We could not help looking. But she
more than amused. She was a perfect oddity. The fact that she was
entertaining had no psychological connection with the fact that we were
watching her. She was a creature of pure pleasure. She was a phenomenon
whose humorous slant did not sympathetically attack us; being a slant of
independence, not comedy. Her long bright hair was dead. She could not be
loved.
Therefore Mademoiselle Comet became our sole entertainment. And she
more than amused; we loved her. Having complete power, we placed her in a
leading position, where we could observe her better. And we were not
amused. We were still ascetically humorous. Thus we aged properly. We did
not, like mirth-stricken children, die. Rather we could not remember that we
had ever been alive. We too had long bright dead hair. Mademoiselle Comet
performed, and we looked, always a last time. We too performed, became
really professional entertainers. Our ascetically humorous slant became more
and more a slant of independence, less and less a slant of rejected comedy.
With Mademoiselle Comet we became a troupe, creatures of pure pleasure,
more than amused, more than amusing, looker-entertainers, Mademoiselle
Comet's train of cold light. We were the phenomenal word fun,
Mademoiselle Comet leading. Fun was our visible property. We appeared, a
comet and its tail, with deadly powerfulness to ourselves. We collided. We
swallowed and were swallowed, more than amused. Mademoiselle Comet,
because of the position we had put her in with our complete power, alone
survived. Her long bright dead hair covered her. Our long bright dead hair
covered us. Her long bright dead hair alone survived; universe of pure
pleasure, never tangled, never combed. She could not be loved. We loved
her. Our long bright dead hair alone survived. We alone survived, having
complete power. Our standards, that is, were impossibly high; and the
brilliant Mademoiselle Comet, a professional entertainer, satisfied them. Our
standards alone survived, being impossibly high.

THE FORTUNATE LIAR

His mother and father were a good pair. His mother was good and his father
was good, and you might have spoken of them separately as each good and
described them as a pair in a different fashion, such as to say that they were a
fortunate pair—were it not that they were such an unfortunate pair that they
were nothing above a good pair. That is, they were together only what each
was separately because they were only an unfortunate pair. His mother and
father were a good pair. They had nothing but their own goodness, and so
were unfortunate. They had nothing and they did nothing; or at least they did
nothing but to tell the truth, which was that they had nothing and did nothing.
They were good and they told the truth and you might add to this that they
were unfortunate, although it is all one. Unfortunate we may say of them in
order to say of them at all, for mere goodness and truth-telling are not
imaginable, certainly not to story-lovers. And yet it is too much to say of
them, though it is the least we can say of them. This discrepancy, however, is
the heart of the story. It is the son.
The son had nothing, but he did not tell the truth. He was a liar. And
therefore it cannot be said that he did nothing. His parents did nothing but to
tell the truth; he did everything but to tell the truth. And so he was not good
like them; neither was he unfortunate. The name of this story, then, might be
The Fortunate Liar; the name of the story at the start, at any rate.
It is only a start, but better a start than a middle or a finish or, worse yet, an
anticipation. Here you have for certain an immediate provocation, excuse or
reason to look, attend, raise the eye, bend the ear, apply the mind—in other
words, to be alive, should other provocation, excuse or reason be at the
moment wanting. Here you have a beginning of The Fortunate Liar, and by
the same stroke you have, if you want encouragement, a beginning of you. A
good start—who wishes for more? And who, having more, does not wish all
the more for a good start? I think you must grant me this. Or we shall never
come to the point. And if we do not come to the point, it shall not have been a
good start.
But even before coming to the point the story might be said to somewhat
begin, as it is not unreasonable to think that as a ghost may appear of a person
after his death, so one may appear before his birth. And the ghost here is in
the sale of a name to the good pair, and with it, you might say, a son to bear
it. For until that day they had no such idea. Indeed you might say the sale of
the idea of a son. Well, and who sold it to them? They said a story like the
story of their son-to-be. And what did they pay for it? They said themselves,
which did not at all pinch them, since they were worth nothing.

MOLLY BARLEYWATER

O MOLLY BARLEYWATER, this is a black world without you, a dirty world.

Your motto was: 'Whatever is not another is Molly and whatever is Molly
must be clean in Molly's name.' And all were sluts except you, Molly; they
lay in the open road of indifference and made nameless filth of themselves.
But you made everything possible clean in your name. You were a
responsible creature, Molly. You were everything possible. You had a
spotless mind.
I remember the last conversation I had with you. You said: 'All is variety.
And variety at its fullest opposes to itself a oneness which, because it is in
opposition to variety, is outside of it. We are endowed with variety. We may
attain oneness.' 'And you would add, I suppose,' I suggested, 'that men are in
variety, women in oneness.' 'Yes,' she said. 'Variety is the male making,
oneness is the female consistency of the making. Oneness is the progressive
suspense that forces the making perpetually to repeat itself, arriving at and
recoiling again and again from oneness.'
'There is hostility then between the two?' I asked. 'Oh yes,' she replied, 'co-
operative hostility.'
'From your earnestness and high feeling, dear Molly, I should say that you
were really talking about love,' I teased.
Indeed I am,' said Molly good-naturedly. 'For love amounts to the same thing
—partnership and suspense.' Tell me about it,' I said. 'Well,' she said,
'suppose love is you and me. We explore each other to the limit of
exploration, we employ each other to the limit of employment, we vary each
other to the limit of variety. This is partnership. It goes on and on, it is
repetition, it keeps reaching a limit, beyond the limit is what? oneness,
suspense. You and me become we, we becomes I, and I is beyond, it is
suspense, oneness.'
'And what of beauty?' I asked. 'Beauty,' she answered, 'is to truth as hate is
to love. In the presence of any difficulty of analysis, "beautiful" springs to the
mouth instead of "true." '
'And what of hate?' I asked. Now Molly's daughter Samson, a clever bald
little girl, had entered the room just before I put this question, and so she
naturally answered it. 'Hate is easily a thing,' she said. 'My daughter is very
anticritical,' Molly said.
'A remarkable child,' I commented. 'And what is your anti-critical method?'
I asked little Samson herself. She replied: 'When I look at something I see
all. To arrive at an opinion I therefore compare what I look at with what I
see.'
'A remarkable child,' I repeated. 'Yes,' said Molly Barley- water. 'Her real
name is Linen.'
 BUTTERCUP

HAVE I a scruple against discussing Buttercup with her handy-man? I have a

scruple, I answer, a scruple for discussing her, and this is why I ask the
question, to discuss Buttercup with her handy-man not by discussion but by
scruple. It is like this: I am discussing with her handy-man who is also the
handy-man of me and his name is Bert for a handy-man's name. And we
discuss in the name of Buttercup because he is a handy-man Bert. I am no
handy-man me, I discuss me in the name of Buttercup with handy-man Bert.
What I say says: I am not Buttercup and what he says says: Buttercup is not
you. And the sense of this is Bert; that is, Bert is a way for me not to be
Buttercup and for Buttercup not to be me. Bert is the not-Buttercup-being of
me and the not-me-being of Buttercup. What then is the difference between
me and Buttercup? The difference between me and Buttercup is Bert. The
difference between me and Buttercup is Bert, or a scruple of discussion. I
will be more frank. You will say: we know that I am I, but what, in short
terms, is she? She, in short terms, is what I should be if my only activity were
the employment of the handy-man Bert. The employment of Bert is the least
of the activities of me, the employment of Bert is the greatest of the activities
of her. All the activities of her end at Bert, the activities of me may be said to
begin at Bert. I mean, in Bert handyness comes to an end. There is practically
no need of Bert, but a need can be made by stretching a point that practically
is not to be practically a point. And she stretches the point amply, she says
there is practically a need of Bert, that there may be practically a need of
Buttercup. Buttercup haughtily demands Bert. I without haughtiness make use
of Bert. If there were no I, only a handy-man Bert (and no practical need of
him)—if there were no I, only a pointlessness, instead of me would be she.
And this is the meaning of her haughtiness, her red hair and the placid over-
certainty of all her parts: to make an impression of reality—on the handy-man
Bert, of course; who receives the impression, but is not impressed. That is,
he believes in her, as she desires; he judges her, as she desires; and judges
harshly, since her desire is harsh, being a constriction upon him to exist, in
the name of her reality. Whereas I make no constriction upon him to exist—
with me he exists or does not, as he pleases. And he does not judge me; he
has no impression of me; there is practically no need of him. Yes, I have a
scruple for discussing Buttercup with her handy-man. It is a kindness, to
leave her fate with him, from whom she gets a harsh mercy. For mercy or
harshness she gets not at all from me, who, but for Bert, would directly
connote her non-existence; which shows how peace may be kept by no more
than a rhetorical scruple.

THE FABLE OF THE DICE

THERE was once a town doomed to destruction, and the inhabitants of the
town knew this, and that three months must pass until the event, and that there
was no escape. But although doom was certain, they preferred to make it a
matter of opinion. For they said: If we admit doom certainly, we shall have
three idle and free months to use up. We shall be without fear, we shall be
forced to do as we please, to be for three months immortal, for three months
to control our fate.'
So, instead of putting the fact of themselves on one side and the fact of
doom on the other, they made of these two facts a confusion and hid
themselves away in it from responsibility; instead of enjoying time, they
marked time. They listened reverently to misty-minded old men who argued
one way or the other, to no conclusion. They played dice in order to
substitute chance for certainty, confusion for order, inaccuracy for accuracy;
not to trick the doom which they knew must befall them, but to trick
themselves of idleness, freedom, pleasure, immortality and power.
In this town there was but one honest and happy person, an old woman,
who said: 'In three months doom shall befall us and there shall be no escape.'
And she refused to argue mistily or to play dice fatalistically. She danced,
and they said: 'You are a wicked old woman.' 'No,' she answered, 'that is
false. I am but an accurate old woman with a sharp sense of history.' 'Some
say,' they told her, 'that in three months we shall all be destroyed. Is it not
mad then to dance, in case this may be so?' 'This is so,' she answered, 'and it
is therefore not mad to dance.' 'But why do you dance?' they asked her. 'In
three months,' she said, 'we shall all be destroyed who dwell in this town.
But until then I may dance my dance safely on this pink cloud.' 'What may the
name of this dance be?' they asked. 'It is the dance of doom, which will befall
us in three months and which therefore has already befallen.'
The next day this old woman was burned for a witch, having first been
tortured for a mad-woman. They watched her disappear from them in a pink
cloud and returned to their dice- playing and to the arguments of the old men,
covering themselves with mistiness in order to be taken by surprise by that
which they knew well they were of themselves approaching.
'They have burned me because I am historical,' said the old woman to
herself on her pink cloud. 'They have burned me because I declared that the
doom which shall befall the town in three months could make no difference
to me, and indeed it cannot. Nor, indeed, can it make any difference to them.
Like Napoleon, they merely pretend this because they have not the lightness
to dance or the beauty to laugh or the courage to mount a pink cloud. Hugging
the earth with their haunches, they bring doom mistily upon themselves in the
trembling dice, to befall them not once but perpetually, as a long rain fills the
open mouths of cowards.'
A bat flew against her. 'Old woman,' it said, 'be not against me. Like you I
am a lover of accuracy. I am a scholar.' 'Foulness,' she replied, 'you are a
student of dice, as a mouse is of cheese, and are destined to the trap.' This
was the last she heard of them, or they of her. The inaccurate dice keep the
stage.

PERHAPS AN INDISCRETION

THINK of it: before the advent of Enough, Insufficiency prevailed.

Insufficiency prevailed, but was made tolerable by climaxes of hunger during
which the accredited prophets (being those with the largest appetites and
hence suffering most) had visions of Enough, by which the accredited
fanciers (being those with the smallest appetites and hence suffering least)
fashioned little images of Enough, which were distributed among the starving
population and had a beneficial effect upon it and were called luxuries.
Naturally with the advent of Enough luxuries ceased to be created.
Now wouldn't you think that the population would have been content with
Enough? Oh, I don't mean that it was greedy and hungered for More. The
prevalence of Enough was general enough, if it comes to that—More,
remember, is only a cynical perversion of Insufficiency. No, the complaints
were in quite another vein. I shall describe that painful situation as briefly as
possible, for it is not pleasant to dwell upon. Remember, I am at the heart of
these apparently remote events, and forgive me if I seem serious. What could
be more forgivable?
Briefly, then, the population complained of the materialism of the new era.
It was generally agreed that life had lost charm with the passing of luxuries,
and two parties arose, the Insufficiency Party and the Luxury Party. The
Insufficiency Party stood for an unqualified return to the statics quo. It was,
of course, the popular party. The Luxury Party was composed chiefly of ex-
prophets and ex-fanciers and its programme was somewhat more delicate
and at the same time more practical. 'Let us not deprive ourselves,' they
declared, 'of the obvious benefits of this era, but let us not on the other hand
sacrifice to these benefits sensibilities that have taken ages of Insufficiency to
ripen. Let us, that is, accept the new facts but retain the old state of mind.'
As was inevitable, the Insufficiency Party lost—simply because the status
quo to which they wished to return no longer existed to return to. I shall now
briefly describe the consequences of the victory of the Luxury Party. You
must understand that after the advent of Enough the temper of life was, or
rather should have been, adequacy. But the Luxurians, who now occupied all
the important administrative posts, brought about a change in this temper, and
little by little it came to be agreed that the entire population was leading a
life of luxury. For a time all went well. But, as was inevitable, the population
grew exhausted by those emotions which attend extravagance. Although the
Superfluity that prevailed was only verbal, all the usual symptoms of excess
set in. Whatever might be the truth of the situation, the fact of it was that the
population was glutted.
What would you recommend? You would recommend, presumably, a new
state of mind. But how may this be brought about? Surely, you would say, by
a new party. And what would you call your new party? You would, would
you not, call it the Sufficiency Party? And how would you describe its
programme? Undoubtedly, to banish the old state of mind by forbidding the
use, hitherto obligatory, of all hyperbolic expressions. I agree that the word
'very' is very detrimental to a serene temper of adequacy. Very well. Little by
little the population becomes sober. It ceases to feel gratitude, wonder, joy or
abandon. It ceases, we might say, to feel. Very well. But have we now a new
state of mind? Have we a state of mind at all? I trust not. In fact, is a new
party necessary at all? Is anything necessary besides, as always, patience?
Or rather was anything necessary besides, as always, patience? Or rather
will anything be necessary besides, as always, patience? Ah, forgive me if I
confuse the tenses. As I said, I am speaking from the centre of these
apparently remote events, and it is disconcerting to me to find that my
remarks do not seem authoritative. Indeed, I fear that I must ask you to regard
them at this stage as being purely confidential. At what stage? Ah, that is for
you to say, not me.

ARISTA MANUSCRIPT

'IF you shrink away into yourself, you are a hater. If you shrink away into
others, you are a lover. If you do not shrink, it is not possible to say offhand
what you are. If it is possible to say offhand what you are, it is an insolence
for you to be alive and thus to give Words an insufficient subject to exercise
themselves upon. They will exercise themselves upon you because they
cannot do otherwise, being from always in complete running order. But they
will not be able to justify themselves in you because you are not a complete
subject; they will as usual seem excessive.'
Thus in a few words Arista Manuscript told how she had no opinion of
lovers or haters. Another time she expressed herself less violently. She said:
'Whether a person be a hater or a lover is all one to me. Either way the result
is to substitute prejudices for verities. And what are prejudices? Prejudices
are little subjects that make up in animation what they lack in extent.'
'You may think that my discourse is disjointed,' she said still another time.
'Of course my discourse is disjointed, how could it be otherwise? Bring me a
complete subject and I will give you coherence.'
'Once a long smiling fellow came to me to have me make a final
pronouncement upon jokes,' she went on to say. It seemed that he had a notion
that a really final pronouncement upon jokes would induce a really final
revelation of truth. Now, that long smiling fellow was mistaken, but he was
exactly mistaken. For a final pronouncement upon jokes would exactly put
out of question a final revelation of truth. As if an imaginary contriver of
living things were to say: "I have now got as far as man. Having got as far as
man, I need not contrive him, he is indicated." So is it with humour and
knowledge. I complimented that long smiling fellow on having brought me
the most exactly incomplete subject that I had ever been invited to expatiate
upon.'
 It goes without saying that Arista Manuscript was powerfully attracted to
stories. 'Stories,' she said, 'are artificially complete subjects. And they
satisfy because they convey a comfortable impression of poverty where there
is no receptive apparatus for an impression of richness. Of course no story-
reader would admit this, but that is the actual ground of pleasure. A story-
reader would say, an impression of adequacy.' She was also fond of critics.
'They are so gentle,' she would say. 'They defend Words fiercely against
Abuses, and yet not one of them in my protracted reign of observation has
ever pointed out that Good Usage differs from Good Use as Good Behaviour
from Goodness. The trouble is, they do not defend Words against Abuse, but
only against Abuses, and instead of demanding Good Use, they demand only
Good Uses, that is, Good Usage. That is, they demand only specimens. The
result is Classics.' Other people admire critics because they are fierce.
Arista Manuscript was fond of them because they were gentle, she would
say. 'When people do not quite succeed in an object they have not quite
specified, I am fond of them,' she would say.
Of course, the sayings of Arista Manuscript are obscure unless one keeps in
mind her ruling passion—a complete subject. And so with critics. Their
destiny was not to have peace until the right thing was. Their destiny was not
to have peace and their function was not to give peace—until. 'Quite,' said
Arista Manuscript. She agreed that she had no cause to complain of them in
their manner with the wrong things, the false subjects. 'But,' she said bitterly,
'they are too anxious to be off to sleep to distinguish between a part and a
whole. They allow themselves to be soothed with phrases because they are
too lazy to specify—for themselves to wait upon as well as authors— entity.
And so, while they keep falling asleep, they also keep waking up.'
Arista Manuscript herself neither slept nor woke up nor ever ceased to
watch. 'In this way,' she explained, 'nothing is sudden to me and I feel no
pain.' From this you must not understand that she did not suffer. She was, be
assured, a woman of extreme sensibility. Only, she did not experience pain. It
might be said that for whatever befell her she was prepared. Because of her
peculiar way of living she saw every unworthiness long before it reached
her. Her spatial medium was knowledge rather than fact. When therefore I
say that she felt no pain, I mean that she felt more than pain. She brooded.

THAT WORKSHOP
IN the workshop nothing is happening. There are no results. Results are the
work of the workshop turning into works or happenings because someone
walks into the workshop and Sees. Someone walks in; but of course doesn't
see everything. Only the whole world walking into that workshop could see
everything. But the whole world does not see and so it does not walk into. If
no one walks in, nothing is happening. If someone walks in, something is
happening. The rest is the sentimental background, or god, of the something,
as authors, for instance, are the sentimental background of literature.
Eyes are to come closer than feet. Feet are the whole world. Eyes are
someone. The whole world walks into that workshop and sees nothing and so
does not walk into. Someone walking into that workshop leaves his feet
outside. What of his eyes, which do not see everything? He leaves these
outside in the workshop.
FINALE

A Later Story: CHRISTMASTIME (1966)

THE story that follows, the only one in this book of later-time writing, was
written for informal Christmastime presenting to friends. In considering it for
inclusion in Progress of Stories I had an uneasy awareness of an attraction
that the book can have for contemporary taste as modern fiction of a high
degree of stylistic sophistication. Those who have adopted the book as an
example in this tradition have, I think likely, read it in obliviousness to a
motif pervading the whole; the tragic sense of what all stories can hold is not
exiled but kept suspended in discreet reserve from the story-telling mood and
scene. This story should help to unsettle the impression that I incline to stay
at removes of icy intellectuality from the emotional potential of the stories I
tell, by the taut closeness to the close-to-tragic happy ending of its portrayal
of how human refusal to despair year on year renames itself hope.

I imagine the Angel of Immediate joys and the Angel of Future Joys and the
Angel of Past Joys all coming suddenly together at the turn of the year, when
the paths of happy memory and happy expectation, and that of present
happiness, suddenly meet and merge. An abrupt encounter!—for none of the
three Angels had been thinking of the others: they tumble into one another—
but save one another from falling, the joys they had been carrying, in great
armfuls, spilled upon the crossways, mingledly . . . What now?
"Glad, glad!" all the people cry out—all cry out except the Angels. "Oh, I
am glad!" everyone says—except the Angels. The people tread on the
spilled, strewn joys as if on a carpet of flowers, scarcely putting feet to
ground.
The people do not know why they are so glad, whether because of old,
remembered joys, or joys hoped-for, or joys of the time-being or the moments
that just were. All the joys seem the same: "Is this not as much happiness as
may be?" they feel. And, almost immediately, they are at a loss, yet do not
know this.
 The Angels, too, are at a loss; and they know that they are so. The festive
moment of the people obscures the further way, the fourth path, the Unknown.
To whom, the fourth path? They hover at the edges of the celebration,
watching how the people go joyfully round and round, and crisscross, and
back and forth, tasting the thought of joy with indiscriminate zest—from then
to now to later to then to later to now to then, mingling times, mingling joys,
in bewildered step. "Ought we not to be doing something to help the people?"
the Angels ask of one another by exchange of bewildered looks. What next
for the people? ("What next for us?")
Suddenly, before the faces of the Angels show any fretful appearance, the
people weary, are heavy with themselves— comprehending as little why they
weary as they comprehended why they celebrated and were so light with
themselves. And they depart in the fourth direction, the way of the Unknown!
— in straggling numbers, their step still bewildered, but as those going
where all must go because there is no other way.
Where to, the Angels? They gather up the spilled joys in their separate
kinds with the prompt touch of the knowledge of one's own—which, flower-
like, freshen in their arms and as from a not-mortal fading. Where next?
The crossways had darkened and shrunk with the departure of the people in
the direction of the Unknown. There was no past or present or future, only the
Unknown, and no light to lead the way but the first imprints of the people's
feet glowing faintly on the new road, the mark of the first slow passion of
their advance, misdoubt struggling in them with curiosity, curiosity with
misdoubt.
The Angels felt the clutch of fear: the people's joys! ("They will need their
different joys . . .") They hurried after, and soon they too were lost from sight
in the Unknown. They will find their separate paths again as the people begin
again to divide their happiness into its ages. The scene is invisible. But time,
the order of knowledge, has been restored. Truth has its clock again.
SOME STORIES IN REVIEW

I have found the early stories presented here so deeply settled into
themselves that it would have been impossible for me to change anything in
them, had I been troubled, in preparing them for republication, by features
seriously faulty to my later eyes. The case is not always so, or necessarily
so, where a writer reviews earlier writings. Stories, once published, are the
most resistant to revision of all kinds of writing. They are not composed, as
poems are, or essays, but constructed, made of pieces put together: changes
could have destructive consequences. They are more fragile than they seem,
for all the labor of construction that goes into them. None of the stories in this
book have been revised in any respect.
In the case of only one story included here, a story of very early date, did
question arise with me of a possible change, and that was as to a single word
used to describe someone appearing incidentally in it. The narrative was in
first-person form. The word was intended to suggest a tendency to spiritual
franticness; it troubled my reviewing appraisal, however, as being of a
slapdash specificness out-of-key with the intention. But I have made no
change, and I have abandoned the idea of a correction-note lest it offend as
insistence on the degree of exactitude that is vexatiously termed
'perfectionism'.
Quite outside my indisposition to doing anything that might upset the
functional weights and balances, pressures and leverages, of story-structure,
are desires prompted on later reading of some stories for arranged reprinting
to provide glosses reporting on my later thought on general implications or
propositions embraced in the particular story shape-of-things. Where I have
done this, the story as textual actuality remains intact. In the case of two
sequels to 'A Last Lesson in Geography', which was reprinted in the
magazine Art and Literature (Paris), 1965, the first printed there after the
story-text, the second, of 1974 writing, kept for possible reprinting, the two
together make later readers companions to my later experience in the field of
thought in which the scene of the story was laid. They are shared increments
of my renewed living relationship to the story, extending the lease of
relationship into which it binds readers and myself: they should not be
unwelcome.
 SEQUEL OF 1964 TO 'A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY'

But eventually it became harder and harder to be playful in learning the

lessons remaining to be learned. For the more one learned, the closer one got
to the reality. And when one got to it, all the things of which one had learned
proved to be relative to one another, so that one ended up knowing the reality
only in part, only in this way and that way, never in the whole. The more we
perfected our knowledge of things, the less and less we learned, indeed: the
more we learned, the less we knew. The closer we got to the reality, the more
we needed to know. There is only one way to know the reality, and that is to
be it.
Now, the She of Us who is such an important character is this story was, of
course, for all her being the Token of the whole in our midst, relative to the
He of Us who is such an important character of our story. The relativeness of
the He of Us to the She of Us as the Token of the whole, or Messenger of
reality, is the essence of the story as far as it was taken. There was left to tell
how it further went, and first as to the obverse relativeness: how, when the
He of Us at last reacted to the She of Us as the Token of the whole (and not
as the Token of Himself), and accepted reality's Message at Her hand
(instead of going on being the Messenger of Himself to Himself), she
gradually became less and less She—even as he was becoming less and less
He. And thereupon She and He gradually became I and I, I, I . . . Whereupon,
I, I, I, I . . . began to rise to its infinite power, We.
Just when we become We is of one parcel with the question, just when one
becomes I. It is for You—which is the same as small-letter we—to give the
answer. There is only one way to know the reality in the whole, and that is to
be it, and only one way to be the reality, and that is to speak it. The finish of
the story must be left to you to tell.

SEQUEL OF 1974 TO 'A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY'

(HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED)

"There is only one way to know the reality in the whole, and that is to be it,
and only one way to be the reality, and that is to speak it." Rereading these
works of my sequel, I am moved to comment on my presented thought about
being the reality. I meant, and mean, this in no sense of appropriation of the
reality in one's being, of scooping it into one's identity. One might say, there's
only one way to know life, and that is to be it, and only one way to be it, and
that is to manifest it. I do not conceive of 'reality' as something of loose
nature to get into one's grasp of apprehension, and to translate into terms of
oneself. My 'be-it' is a being-it in the sense of being of it—a making oneself
into what it is, so that one is expressive of it, and expressive of it as an all-
distinct 'something' of an all- distinct nature, into which one translates
oneself. This sequel may help to clarify imagination of the scene of being in
which 'we' becomes 'We'.

In 1971, the story 'The Fable of the Dice' was read by an admirer of it at a
London meeting of members of the learned professions (The Science Policy
Foundation, Third International) attended by him, as pertinent to the general
theme under discussion, 'The Predicament of Man'. The course of discussion
was later covered in a book of this title. Feeling that the sense of the story
had probably got lost in the environment of the proceedings, I prepared some
comments on it, which were included in the book's notes. I shall reproduce
here only a small part of them, mainly what sprang new to mind in fresh
contact with the story after many, many years. I distinguished between the
attitudes of the inhabitants of the town doomed—with its inhabitants—to
destruction, and the exception to them of the attitude of the old woman not
under the spell of the misty-minded old men who gambled away the time till
fall of doom: all, the old woman excepted, opposed chance to certainty, in a
state of continual destruction, while she refused to submerge the reality of her
being in the inevitability of a coming catastrophe. She puts it on record, I
wrote, "that there's more to this matter of how things go, disastrously, or non-
disastrously, by the canon of events," than gambling accommodations to ill-
fate and good-fate possibilities. Her position is neither one of cynicism nor
naïve self-confidence. She holds on to the actuality of herself. This much,
surely, readers of the story can deduce for themselves: it is all there. The
increment of renewed thought-life, in terms of the story, that resulted from my
attempt to clarify the terms for its appearance in that book ought to be shared
with the readers of this one.
The storyteller does not insist on completing the story . . . The story is,
as it were, waiting for its 'things'—the persons, the characters—to
become fully real and bring the story to a live end—give it its truth.
 Only four other stories, besides those on which I have been reporting, have
been subjects of published comment by me in my later writing years. These
are four that I chose for appearance in the magazine Chelsea, issue 35,
published in early 1977, the entirety of which consisted of selected published
and unpublished writings of mine. These four are the last four stories of
Progress of Stories. The comment on 'In the Beginning' adds to it, in its
buoyant disregard of the scantiness of its buoyant material, an outlining frame
for all stories upon this great theme—as necessarily, in their unavoidable
playfulness in some of their features, to be brought together in solemnizing
correlation. I cannot think that this later view of the story would be other than
helpful to readers of it, it having been helpful to me in my understanding of it.

ON 'IN THE BEGINNING'

What do you think of this little depiction of…? But first, you ought to be
asking me "Beginning of what?" Having put the question for you, I shall
answer it: the beginning of appreciation of the absolute inevitability, the
necessity, indeed, of having, the obligation to have, even, a point of view
about the entire setting of human existence, the 'where' of human life. It all
calls for a point of view about itself. Who else will form one? Of course,
once this forming of a point of view about 'the world' begins, there follows a
growth of such points of view, in numbers of individual ones, and in
enlargements of common tendencies of individual ones into great dominating
ones that seem to settle, for people, a lot of uncertainty as to what the right
point of view is. Of course, such simplifications settle nothing. The safest
procedure is to start at the beginning of one's individual dealing with the
inevitability, necessity, in the manner of our little Miss, and keep moving
straight along on one's own line of decision as to what to think of it all until
one's line meets up with other lines, all meeting up with one another. Such is
the spirit of this little story's story of the world: avoid bent lines—either
bending one's own or letting a line of many bends run itself along one's own a
while and persuade one that one's own line ends in it. My story is not, you
see, a simple fancy—or a simple anything. I was its author, but I am here
writing in part at least as a fellow-reader. Telling you what I think of the
story, reading it now. Then, off to our different lines of decision, about it, and
all else— till the lines meet.
 The comment I wrote for the Chelsea collection on 'Eve's Side of It' may, to
readers' first-thought, seem tedious excess of glossarial remarks. Why not
leave the old story to the tender mercies of its readers' best understanding,
and keep my second-thoughts to myself as belonging to the author's private
problems of judgement of the effects of a piece of writing—or to Criticism?
My first answer to such a question would be: "As I had to presume readers of
these stories to be with me in the writing of them, the bond is a perpetually
cemented one. I have not put this out of mind, come to regard the stories as if
they existed in the vacuum of history: we are, by them, alive together—and I
do not speak so, contemporarily, in mere literary sentiment."

ON 'EVE'S SIDE OF IT'

I should like to provide this little story with a prologue and an epilogue. The
prologue would warn readers against trying to see the story as a feminist
interpretation of the Creation followed by a feminist analysis of the historical
situation—the life of men and women (according to feminist argument) up to
the point where it ceases to be a mere course of changes that did not ever
amount to any general, permanent, pervasive change in it, the original
masculinist concomitants of the Creation circumstances remaining the great
Flaw. The epilogue would remind readers that they had had this warning in
the prologue—for they would have forgotten it, in the inveterate manner of
readers of reading as they pleased, and not as they were supposed to read.
Yet, apart from the difficulty of winning the reader's kindness to the author's
intentions, such twin provisions would, indeed, probably arouse suspicion
and induce belief that what one said the story was was not just what it was.
The author is not supposed, according to The Rules (for the telling of
stories) to put in an appearance in a story, or too near a story to remind of its
having an author, as a First Cause operating from outside the story—unless it
be a fictive appearance. But stories are not what they used to be. The rules
are not what they used to be; or, rather, it has become intellectually
fashionable to substitute a law of spontaneous narrative for The Rules, which
outlaws sequential pertinence as unnaturally life-like. When something is
intellectually fashionable, it commands, if not respect, fear: if you do not
treat it as a deliverer from the oppression of now knowing better, you will be
thought intellectually unfashionable.
 The tolerant attitude to confusion characteristic of these times is favorable
to experimental procedure and thinking: there shapes itself, in the confusion,
the premise, inspiring faith in experimentalism, that all procedure, and all
thinking, from the beginning of thinking and procedure-devising, have been
experimental, for want of the possibility of their being otherwise, and that the
best to be effected is, therefore, that which is the most experimental. Thus is
it that, in contemporary story-writing, the question, where the author is in a
story, whether on the outside looking (and writing) in or on the inside one
minute and on the outside in the next, or broken into two author personalities
or more, that work in shifts directing the working personnel (the story-
characters), is not necessarily asked at all.
When I wrote this story, I believed in the reality of stories as description of
some of the unknown content of life that answers honorably to the
affectionate desire for knowledge of it all, under deprivations of various
sorts that limit the quantity of such knowledge available, in measure
proportionate to the desire. The belief has not left me. I hold the concern with
making stories, having stories, using them for maintenance of the imaginative
loyalty to the sense of life as of a busy fullness in its general forces as
exemplified in the personal living of it, and a perfect correspondence to this
fullness in its content of detail, to be important to human sanity, and general
being of intellectual good heart. And the dissolution, in these times, of love-
of-story, longing need of it for the exercise of desires not only of life-devoted
mind but of the hopeful soul, in a characterless appetite for employments of
the faculties of sympathetic attention in whiles of habitual idleness, I view as
being of very potent general demoralizing effect upon the spiritual fortitude
of human beings.
What are the chances that my making comments on this story will be helpful
to readers if they have this contemporary predisposition to viewing a story as
an escapade in literary invention, an experiment in writing in a narrative
manner? I faithfully risk skeptic disingenuous reading of my comments, as I
risked the like with the story itself. In writing this story, I wrote writing to
which I gave the identity of a story, presenting it to readers as such, because
I meant the word 'story' for name of its identity. I meant to be telling a story,
not to be doing anything else. If certain persons, their being, and existing in
the world of happenings, personal and natural, can be imagined as a credible
possibility, there is in this the making of a real story: who tells it means it,
means the name 'story', means the story he-she tells. I meant it all, the story
'Eve's Side of It'. I meant: a character Eve, of whom stories were told of old,
that I imagine as 'really' existing, far, far, back in existence; and the same,
with Lilith, she further back. Great, big personality-actualities looming up in
the dramatics of the Private Life of the universe named 'human', Lilith
wrapped in veils of gloom never quite shed, seeming more a Mood weighing
upon time's yet undetermined content than an imaginatively locatable Being.
The other personality of the story is of ubiquitous placeability!
The personality 'Eve' was an articulate presence: "I am not to be treated as
a mythical character," it declared. "Whatever I am thought of as being, by the
Others, or in relation to the mythical Adam, whether a piece of the like of
him, or them, or made in the image of them as made in the image of that in the
image of which they have conceived themselves to be generally made—
whatever has been or is done with me in ideas, I have to be treated as real."
This being real, over and over, in every occurrence of me as to be included
in the lived story of life, is both my welcome to the Others, as proving them
real, and very inconvenient to their theories of the nature of life, which they
deduce from the nature of themselves understood as that of philosophers
whom the universe invented for the purpose of having bestowed upon it by
them, to its peace and glory, the explanation of its existence. If I, in my
irrepressible being wherever they have being, in numbers balancing in a
natural sort of way with their own, am not otherwise knowable than as real,
what of the theories about 'reality' as knowable only by most complex
processes of—? There is incessant argument as to whether knowable by
intuitive or rational processes (an impossible opposition, since the
difference is only between speedy apprehension of a little, and step-by-step
accumulative apprehension of much, of what is to be known of the entire
knowable—or 'reality', as they call it).
But what of the new one? This is a story: it has got to be as broad as it's
long. A story moves on, but it always takes all of itself along with it—the
persons, and the happenings, don't just disappear from one part to the next.
The story holds it all together. It is about all that it is about. And so, if we
are to pay respect to the character Eve who has figured so importantly in the
stories of the past of our Life, we owe it to the sincerity of our story-sense of
the real to put everything into the story of Eve that agrees with our ability to
tell it or read it or listen to it as real, in the way in which stories can have
realness.
As to the meaning of 'the new one': it means that this is a story. A story does
not cut itself short with itself, does not 'really' end. A story hangs suspended
in time. The New One, one might say, is the she-I when the story breaks out
of its perpetual condition of occurrence in past time, and overthrows the
literary difference between Story realness and Life realness, between what is
imagined with belief in the possibility of its being 'true' and what is
perceived with the eyes of knowledge to be of the very stuff of reality, and
requiring therefore to be thought of as material of the story of Life. For there
is this peculiarity, this wondrous naturalness of story as truth of the
imaginable, that empowers it to become a changeling, in its character of
narrative, when thought's vision authenticates the credibility of the
imaginable. Story is the communication of human beings to human beings of
beliefs as to what the life of human beings is 'really' like. This metaphoric
mode of narrative suits both the case of uncertainty in knowledge of what
things are really like, the subject being a universe of complexity, and the case
of the uncertainty of the human form of being as to just what, in full and final
determination, it is (whether as form self-determined or brought to be what it
determinedly is by the managements of universal circumstantiality). Story has
to stay metaphoric and at the same time (in so far as it is genuine in its really-
like effect of truth) come to the very finest margin of vergence on the realm
where story-telling changes naturally into truth-telling, story narrative into
truth, the narrative that must be kept self- renewing.
Such is the doctrine of implication of this story. It may be said that, when I
wrote it, the doctrine was but a matter of good-faith keeping with the spirit in
which I wrote it—my sense of where story fits into patterns of human
communicative behavior, which includes so much that is imitation of truth
that great confusion exists as to what is truth, what untruth, what falsehood,
what lying. It will have been noted that I have let myself 'go' in making these
comments on the story, speaking about it and its characters now as author,
retrospectively, now as myself as present-time reader of it, now dramatizing
the personality of Eve of the story in words spoken as by her, additionally to
the first-person mode of narrative of the story, and now, even here, in the
midst of authorial comment, slipping into commentator's self-identification
with the personality Eve. I think all this proves the extraordinarily live nature
of story as the next-best thing to truth—when it is formed with love of it for
its capability of feelable likeness to life. It does not prove, should not be
taken to prove, that, as author, I conceived Eve to be a spitting like of myself,
in writing the story, and that in commenting on it I recast this
autobiographical hallucination by making an appearance as the spitting real
of the story's Eve. The key to Story is bountiful sympathy with the immensely
varied actualness of life, as the key to Truth is bountiful knowledge of
actualness, in the immense unity of its significances. I have spread out the
case of my little story about Eve to conversational breadth with interest in
generating an atmosphere of ease between readers of it, and it, and readers of
it and myself. And I leave the matter at that.
But a little more, finally, as to 'the new one': let her be just that. Do not take
her out of this spiritually modest story into the raucous favor of current
feminist narrative. And so I have, after all, supplied an epilogue, which can
be used also as a prologue.

While my later reviewing of the stories is confined to just a few, the

prompting for it being almost accidental, not, at any rate, programmatic, an
example of what can happen when commentary is taken in hand by Criticism
is provided in a treatment of 'Eve's Side of It' and 'In the End.' It is ground for
arguing both the futility of visitations of commentary by authors to their
writings, and their serviceability at least where danger of defective
understanding or arbitrary interpretation has become evident. A book
recently published in which feministic analysis is employed as an instrument
of literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic—The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Gubar, is citable in support of both views. The authors have chosen a
short passage from 'Eve's Side of It' to use as a front-of-the-book epigraph
because Lilith is named in it, describing me in the body of the book as
depicting Lilith as "an archetypal woman Creator"; and they have adopted a
short passage from 'In the End' as an epigraph for the first chapter. It is clear
from their notes that they know these stories from their Chelsea appearance,
and so have seen my comments accompanying them there. No reference is
made to what I wrote on the first in specific cautioning. The spirit of what I
wrote on the second, which reflects a conception unallied to feministic
ideology, is disregarded. The passages are cast, with implied
authoritativeness, as relevant to the authors' theses. The ineffectiveness, here,
of my commentary can be reasonably viewed as evidence of particular need
of its general availability.
 The little commentary on the third of the last four stories, 'Privateness',
should have some use as chasing away temptation to read it as an exercise in
realism of a stoic pathos. My commentary on 'In the End', in which I stress
the story's being no feminist tract, should present no difficulty for readers
who have made their way to the book's last pages (these bearing upon the
content of the last pages of the original Progress of Stories!).

ON 'PRIVATENESS'

Will I be gilding the obvious, if I declare this bare little story an idyll of
sanity, a reduction of the course of perfect love to the mechanism of
simplicity? This life of two is described as capturing the peace that does not
pass understanding. All in it is of a perfect unremarkableness, but nothing in
it is 'ordinary': the story takes into the interior or human acceptance of
humanness. It is, in its picturing of this, of the natural material of revelation.

ON 'IN THE END'

Here, there is no revelatory procedure! This is a translation of intuitive

apprehensions of the nature of human existence, as being of a tenor that is at
once cosmically and humanly real, into a story-form of understanding: the
task of explaining the tenor of the apprehensions is entrusted to the
imagination. All such attempts to justify very seriously conceived ideas of a
veritability obtaining real as better than intellectual inventions with
imaginative specifications have the peculiarity of combining the strange and
the familiar in their picturing. The story-effort will combinedly satisfy and
not-satisfy because the story carries a cargo of factuality in its imagination-
hold: can it be factually as well as imaginatively successful?
For me, the non-satisfying aspect of this story concentrates itself in the
dicta that rise up, in the story's closing offices, from the depths of its burden
of factual significance. Yet the story needed some relief of literary
expression; in these dicta, the element of factual significance has been
transmuted into vaporous effusions that curl their way out of sight—the story-
vessel being as carried along with them into disappearance.
 Are children 'really' omens of despair—the beasts, of familiar evil? There
are senses arguable by which the two declarations have some factual
reasonableness. Skipping to the attributions of envy to flowers, scorn to
rocks, feigning to water: likewise, there are senses arguable, for these, that
are capable of serving as glosses of fact, in delicate evaluations of
significance. But the final pronouncement is the good-bye to itself of the
story's freight of factualistic implication as it evaporates into
problematicalness. Those who are tempted to linger over that
pronouncement, detaining it from its work of clearing the story-horizon of all
residual clouds of prophetic suggestion, will find that nothing more is
suggested in it but that complete knowledge of what will be, as it becomes
knowledge of what is, dissolves the difference between story and fact, and
puts an end to endings.
It may be appropriate to say here that the temptation to linger is very
characteristic of us all, as we fight our way to fullness of wisdom between
the distractions of actual story and those of as yet only conjecturable fact.

On those who may feel my report on my surviving interest in the stories to

trespass on their own interest distractingly, I urge a deferring of impatience
with me. Readers themselves can acquire, in time, concerns of conscience
towards writing they care about, and know all the promptings and pangs of
responsibility of the author.