My grandfather is sitting in the doorway of his long low
carpenter's shed of tarred board, like a tree barber for a fallen
wooden curl lies pale under a trestle. As I stood at his gnarled
knees beneath the humble apron, it seemed I was not so near to him
as our actual proximity would warrant; his timid benevolence con-
veying how useless he felt it would be to grow fond of me. A still
born love kept us company in the interior of that quiet black hutch

Disappearances - 2

built on a plot of waste ground with the same wildgrass as in the
ditch pressing upon its threshold.

Understanding that all operative objects have magical
properties for small creatures like myself, he shows me an enormous
magnet. I can see the new vermilion of its lean horseshoe exactly
and how, with the passing of years, its size has decreased.

as if it were a premonition of what in human terms would be an intense me.

This 'instantaneous' of my English maternal grandfather
blows out in a puff of condescension given off by my mother, and
on that same puff his wife some months later settles in an uncommodious
posture on the apple green plush of a flimsy gilt chair in our
drawing room.

Her daughter, as in those days was the style, 'toys languidly'
with an ivory and gilt paper-knife. In her fingers the paper knife
would slip and twist as if handled by one blind. But all the same
I could see it was a weapon with which in some metaphysical manner
she succeeded in skewering this shrinking grandmother, who was almost
afraid to look at me, to her pretentious little chair.

As In ancient times <u>Sorceresses</u> were accompanied by their familiar. Likewise, the will-to-Achieve may be seconded by an impulsive geni who can, if he cares, direct all the currents or hazard to further its course, and who advertises his presence by the showing of signs.

while It seemed for a time as if I had come under his tutelage, for like the aboriginal who, on issuing from his <u>hut</u>, encounters

omens, I picked up a diamond and other precious things when I went
out for walks.

Gracious, Miss," said my nurse, you've got good luck.
So this is luck, I reflected, now that sense no longer
turns intuitions, Nothingness itself will crop up in values that
remain. I revelled in the promise of my luck, I was convinced
that not only should there be no hindrances, but that all the
hidden forces of fate would actually cooperate with me.

Being an optimistic throwback, I knew perfectly well
what to do about luck, for I had just been taught how to count
up to ten. But I was escape from the intuitions era, In spite
of the strain entailed in reaching the handle of the door, driven
to escape from the Victorian era to shut myself up in an unpeopled room to
enclose myself with 'what has always been' alone with the air
that is 'knowing' what I really am.

Once alone, I would turn round and round until objective
reality dissolved and stop when I round myself attracted in a
direction. It was imperative that I should bow low in this direc-
tion while certain numbers I had learned made a great to-do in my
brain. Numbers that are forces for my protection, at once very
present and very remote. Numbers that must not only be muttered,
but also spoken to. The awe they inspired was overpowering and
only offset by the security they bestowed. They must, moreover,
be bowed out to the measure of their own count. And by some
chance they were numbers immemorably holy.

However, my indeterminate impressions of the solids and
shadows that formed my home could hardly incite will-power, they
having in the period of magical play been drained of all con-

Jurative properties except a lingering tendency to disappear ~~and~~ allow the gradual outreaching of the imagination to superpose an inchoate racade of the future, built to the indiminishable perspective of curiosity on my actual surroundings, even as the natal inspiration had once masked all phenomena.

For If the will is a force, it is so much the compliment of curiosity that the call of the unknown most efficaciously stirs it to action, and the unyielding limits of the home afford the most urgent pressure in ejecting it into a larger ~~world.~~ sphere.

So While I was as yet nothing but a bud of animation, so exactly like a toy from its miniature race to the lace on its drawers, in falling after a rubber ball I decided to conquer the world.

It did not matter at all that the words 'world' and 'conquest' were absolutely unknown to me, for Concepts are embedded in the human mind long before they become communicable. Just as degrees of impetus are defined by mathematical processes, ✓ I intuited my impulses and their oppositions quantitatively if not in kind.

According to the etiquette of mythology, the will must encounter a dragon, but at that toy-like stage the parental, or counter-will is still lurking, ~~for~~ unconsciously it awaits the convenience of seizing its opponent on common territory. So the formless premonitions of a conquestorial future continued to hang about me undisturbed, like the lace that ambitious arachnoids spin out or reach for. Desire puts its own construction on emptiness. Yet nothing pertaining to my phantasmal conjectures materialized until one day I happened on a little door. ~~There are~~ ne

many threshholds that may be crossed for entrance into non-exist-
ant sanctuaries.

It was a door that lay on a low table, prostrate for
lack of any palpable jamb to support it. I opened it and found
that this entrance gave onto another door; this one so flimsy
that it fluttered back to disclose what seemed to me an infinite
succession of white, four-cornered flaps. They were covered with
linear conundrums.

This was the first phenomenon that had come within my
range that had nothing about it or the 'déjà'vu' of infantile con-
tinuity. These signs of signs that record the centuries of
intellectual intrication have no cosmic prototype, but mark a cer-
tain independence of man that did have a beginning.

AS the result of many inquiries I gathered at last that
such doors as these open onto the contents of time; that behind
them is stored the composite brain of humanity preserved in
microscope slides; the final answer to the whole question. ~~All that was needed for access was to decipher the unfamiliar~~
markings. A

A challenge to the curious will. I became such a pest invading other people's occupations, pointing to a mysterious page⁵ that I was given a fat book of rhymed alphabets. Enormously I concluded I held the doors of the universe ajar with my hands. By the time I was four years old, I knew how to read. My life as a scholar began at that age. But I could not guess when I came to Z is for Zantippe, who was a great scold that again the methodical accidents of destiny's subconscious had, through my first scrap of knowledge, predicted the death of the will.

Islands in the Air

CHAPTER VI

DISAPPEARANCES.

Roads whose old walls have trees casting shade over them
are hospitable; one's thoughts as one lingers ahong in their
gentle dust are not returned to one empty. They bring in a branch
a moss some bird's banter or a snail in the hollow off a shadow.
Surrounded by trees behind an exceedingly high wall in St. John's
Wood North Hall is like a discreet lady, with its turret decollete
for the stranger's eye just so far and no further. She conceals
her treasures as any home should.

Accompanied by a nebulous presence I wait for the door
in the wall to open, but on the rang of the iron bell this
whole house, with its garden, disappears forever, leaving me
nothing to remember but a rustic summer house. The forked logs
nailed to it for decoration are dusted with soot.

Inside there is a wooden seat. It is defiled. A hen's
egg has been smashed upon it spreading a yellow murder in its
viscous pool. I knew that chickens came out of eggs, but this
meaningless contour of mislaid life my mind is unable to cope
with. More difficult ' than death, for this had never lived.
I yet felt constrained to stand before it with my head bowed
in the sullen reverence one shows to funerals. The defrauded
race of chickens pecked at the gravel unconcerned.

' Disappearances '

34

To leave it alone seemed so heartless. But if I tried to bury it, it would drip before I could. It seemed to lie there for a thousand years until I dare not go near that summer house again. It was haunted.

After vaguely intuiting a manner of battle between a woman and a building --- the battle field is littered and we move away --- onto a square of sunlight the window has laid on the nursery floor. In relation to me the window itself is high as in a prisoner's cell, but my mother has come down to me on the carpet. Absorbed in an act of creation, I hardly notice the unusual shape her figure assumes in sitting beside me. I am putting the finishing touches to an exact reproduction of my entire concept of my baby sister LILLY, a feeding bottle. I had somewhere seen steeped with its indiarubber tube in a pan of water. Inspired and painstaking I have perfected it, moulding it as it were out of the first plastic material that came to hand and am holding it out of my mother's admiration of its translucent body and snaky neck, when a loud rapping startles the trivial scene into permanence. The door in the distance says " if you please mam, Mrs Gore LILLY, " and my mother gets up with some difficulty of creaking busks. There is nothing smouldering about her for the time being --- she is empty and innocuous now as people are when playing with infants. Two tiny windows are dancing in the glasses on her face. I am overcome by an acute sensation that she is helpless and foolish and as she rises in the air drawing this feeling of mine with her, it changes into a chivalrous impulse to protect this vulnerable being.

" Disappearances "

The door has shut on that audience to which a work of art owes half of its existence and I am all alone when to my cruel amazement in the palm of my outstreched hand I find lying a queer abortion a sharp needle ( is not one aspect of life each one alone with danger ? ) the thread in its eye is wound round and around its middle like a little tough white belly. TheXTHREAD MEMORY

The thread of memory, unwinding, draws out across my eyes and becomes a concrete layer of pure white objects suspended in mid-shadow of the night-nursery.

The baby's cradle is hung about with clean muslin and on the marble top of the wash-stand beside a monumental basin and ewer the rays of an opaline lamp relieve all the whiteness there is in the room, so that the smooth honeycomb coverlid on nurse's cold bed drips light on its coarse cotton fringe, even into the deep sub-furnitureal darkness in which I lie in wait.

There is a black cloth column standing by the cradle that breaks over my invisible sister, and, hushed as the lamp-light, a voice speaks out of it, saying " Iarrhea, mam-- it is quite green."

------ the layer of dark mystery whence anything may issue has risen from the region of human feet to those inaccessible plains where only flies can crawl, for the light from the windows, opening out like a fan, does not enter the angle of wall and ceiling packed with the slats of packed-venetianx blinds.

" Disappearances "

The trend of something tossed directs my eyes so that
sombre barrier dividing the bright expanses of whitewash and
curtain with an impenetrable strip of shadow, and all in a
swish, two slight silhouettes clatter down from the cornice,
turning upon themselves and flap onto the floor." Oho, "cries
my mother, who must have come in from the door behind me, The
fairies have sent you a surprise. Let us see what it is."

Two cardboard valentines with sky-blue cotton satin
banjos laid in paper lace valentines on to them. I had just
had time to hear that the fairies had written " with love from
Louis and Bertie" on the back of them, before, for fear that we
should spoil them, the fairies, this time spirited them away.

The trees in the sun are all alive and the grass of
Hampstead fields is like shiny hair dressed with buttercups.
Perhaps here is the very site of the jerry-builders semi-detached
residence in which later on I shall come to live, but as yet it
is a land of treasure for rigid and ethereal lace is lying at
the foot of a poplar, I have found a skeleton leaf. Through its
interstices of decease I stare at a disintegrated sun, until
nurse takes it away from me because it is time for me to go home.

Dawdling along the hedgerow I see a miniature tower
crowned with white and every story composed of heart-shaped
leaves. I am about to pull it when nurse who is growing impatient
calls back to me " If you pick that weed( it was the shepheard's
purse ) your mother will die " Too late! The stalk has already
broken. "NO! No! " I cried despairingly to the mysterious

" Disappearances "

Everything, before whom all vows are vowed " May all my grandfathers and grandmothers die --- only *not* my mother". I felt quite satisfied my prayer would be answered--- after all I had not been 'shown' my grandparents since I was'old enough' to notice things The coincidence would not strike me until later. Within the year both my grandmothers and my only surviving grandfather did die. Ever since I have had the conviction that were I to wish evil to befall any one, my wish would be fulfilled. All my life I have had to be very, very careful.

The disparity between this world and fairyland is easily effaced if we disregard proportion and transpose relatively to our convenience. The ribs on the leaded roofing that jut out over the stairs leading down into the garden are very far apart; but fancy soon brings them together as I look down from my window.

So throwing myself on a wooden bench set against the sooty trunks of elms at the end of the lawn, I have arrived to stare into the inverted depths of a sea of green leaves in the sky, where the sun, through layer upon layer, splashes upon the platform of the branches spreading their peaceful foliage higher and higher and Titania is just about to appear, when my mother and the cook come hurtling down the iron embroidery of the garden stairs. It

" Disappearances "

is as if feathers are flying off them as when the sparrows
bickering in the elms------

Father and his visitor are not sitting under the elms
for fear of bird droppings. They have moved their chairs away.
All that I can ramember of the visitor is the tempo of his
running back and forth across the lawn as he talked while my mo
mother with the irate dignity innate to her, her abdomen steering
her fine draped dress, paced the lawn lengthwise. Each time
she *crossed* him I distinctly felt an electric crackle. It seemed
he had promised me a rocking-horse, and *waving* his arms about
he explained how he had had to send it back to the manufacturers
*in Vienna* at the very last moment to have several inches cut off
the legs, which had been made too long. From *this* interesting
conversation I gathered that this horse had often 'not been
ready', although I had forgotten ever *having* seen this man *before*
who was one of my father's step-relations, before ( and from the
way my mother ground her feet into the grass, I felt I should
hardly see him again) or hearing of any rocking - Horse. I
found his present particularly satisfying with its tail that
last time had been too short; the time before that too pale;
with its stirrup too large, its reins too broad, for as it was
*not there* it was as excitingly incompatible with reality as my
own visionary inventions. But my mother could not countenance
his cheating a little child. She upbraided him for his cruelty,
and, lowering her deep upperlip on disdain too profound to
express, she sent me up to bed and resumed her meditative stroll

" Disappearances "

When I was half undressed, she came running into the
nursery to show us " a dear little bird. " she had found fallen &
out of its nest. " I kept kicking it along the grass " she said.
" I mistook it for a bit of red flannel". There it lay, mauled
to a pulp, of that queerly putrid quality that bird flesh has
without its feathers, an ancient and sarcastic look on its
dying eye and monstrous beak. " When I found it was a bird,"
my mother continued brightly, " I thought, " Oh, I must take
it indoors to show the children--- How they will love to see it,"

At the end of our street the butcher's, Baxter's grocery,
everything, is shut except for the little sweet shop. Its crooked
door is sunk below the pavement and leans up against a bow-window
streaming with licorice boot laces and overrun by sugar mice
whose tails are wisps of darning wool.

Its unreal air of unapproachable things ( for Nurse says
only 'common children ' go there) confuses it somewhat in my
thoughts with a shop in the Christmas pantomimes whence Harle-
quin, a pied audacity, steals endless strings of sausages, and
Pantaloon lunges the policeman with a red hot poker, while
Columbine twirls.

In that striking incompetence to which idols are restricted
in regard to other creations of man, that almost illogical
impotence shared by simulacres, the sweetened vermin may
make no inroads on the pile of iced biscuits forming the central feature
of the window display, any more than I can, standing helpless in
longing before a pane of glass.

" Disappearances "

40

132

that existence without presence which shatters errant gulls on
light houses,

In the pantomine a beneficient apparition declares " I am
your.... fairy God-mother " , --- " Urgrossmutter " , gasps the
most crude perhaps of all realities, an aged woman, appearing as
if from nowhere to totter towards me on superanuated tiny
sinewy feet. She also has the starkness of images and is covered
with black brocade and bugles, all fringed and lacy; a bonnet
encloses her head in a crescent and is tied under her chin with
almost that violaceous shrill proper to Episcopal silk.

She is so thin, so straight. The copious wave of her jet
black hair might be that of a doll who is kept in a drawer.
Before her noble narrowness her tremulous hands spiced as if in
prayer as she peers at me unpoint and part to patter upon my
face, and raising the vessels of these tears that fall on me,
in praise to Iahweh, she chokes, " Mein schönes Kind".

At once a bestowal and a reception the unctious schön in
the unvanquished croon of an ancestry over its foredoomed
offspring soothes me and swathes me for once in the nomadic
embrace. A fallen fledging I am picked up and the aching quills
are redressed.

This single envelopment in my paternal great-grandmother's
adoration bequeahed to me a stangely emotional phenomenon which
I am sure must be what in the old Testament is described as"his
bowels melted within him", and that as there is an amorous
orgasm which is the juncture of our sensibility with cosmic
sentience, so there is a spiritual orgasm, the mystic's admittanc
to cosmic radiance, an intellectual one immingling with the

" Disappearances "

intelligential ether, an aesthetic one on our impact with any
of the myriad facets of cosmic beauty, so there is an orgasm of
loving compassion, the lust of the humane, which may be common in
a race whose love fer itself must at length have become insepe-
rable from the uttermost compassion.

The eyes we instantly recognize are those in which we find
ourselves instated. These of my ancestress are swallows disorien-
ted in migration dipped to captivity under the arch of her brow,
and my eyes, also, appear to have flown onto my face looking
dower
up into hers as she bestows upon me an even greater heritage
than compassion: the right to choose; for pointing to the window
of the little sweet shop she asks me a question I have never
heard, "What would you like?"

So, as I watch her sere beauty in return to a puzzling
exile fade, retrogressive as age, into the fog, my hands are
holding a bag of iced biscuits molded with rose and citron
sugar stars.

My mother, who always seemed to lie in total and eternal
disoccupation in some invisible lair of her own ( unrelated to
anything existent for us ) and about to spring, was extremely
vexed with my nurse, loudly reproaching her for" allowing that
woman to come near my children" . She dashed my sublime little
stars onto the hall floor and snarled " Great- grandmother is
she? Well let me tell you she'll burn in hell, buying biscuits
on a Sunday. "

" Disappearances "

42

............But only her night dress catches fire as she reaches for her medicine on the mantel-piece. And the Great-grandmother, who had already looked so startled living alone with her foreign language in the street at the back of ours, opened her window screaming, "Feuer!" for a fire engine while the draught flapped up the yellow flames as they fed on her hounded body.

--00000900--

Lacking the material for conversation one can imagine a rudimentary family only aroused to social intercourse by the opening of the front door. A face id lifted. A voice inquires "Going out?" ........." So you've come in?" almost with animation, for a temporary escape from over-familiar circumstances favors the possibility that an absentee may, like the primitive hunter returning to his cave with a carcass, capture an incident to be shared with those who remained at home.

So mother would always, when we went out for our walks or come back, appear from whichever room she happened to be waiting in, probably charging her batteries for her encounters. As little peasants who, espying unusual tourists at the turning of a lane, will jump out and mock them, she had always something extremely disturbing to say, thus adding to my discomfort stuck in too many clothes all rammed into a coat that was rather tight for me.

Once, as I waited in the shadows of the hall, having absent-mindedly, in spite of urgent instruction as to macabre

" Disappearances "

43

consequences, succumbed to the child instinct to absorb
everything into itself, an accident befell me. I swallowed
my indiarubber.

I was very frightened and, looking about me in hope of
help, or at least some consolation on my departure from this
earth, all I encountered was what looked to me, considering the
circumstances, a heinous glint in my mother's eye." What a
wicked girl," she crowed," crying because you've swallowed an
indiarubber. You ought to be glad to go to heaven and be a
little angel."

This was the only time it was ever suggested I might not end up in hell. But as my nurse( for it was quite a small erasor from the end of a tin pencil- holder) immediately pushed me into the street with her, remarking "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do", I could not distinguish a difference

One afternoon, however, mother was occupied and we were
taken in to say goodbye to her. Lying on a sofa with a book
"Come here" she said , pointing to an engraving of something
vague wrapped up in a sheet, " and look at Shakespeare.
Hamlet, I am thy father's ghost."

But there was nothing uncanny about this quotation at the
time. All it conveyed to me was that my mother was pleased to
disseminate information. A beam of light filtered through the
meshes of a curtain and played about he head as she kissed me
goodbye. But now, after nearly half a century, so many
accidental recollections arise in turn like shades to an incan-
tation.

Why that drop of blood in guise of a jewel? - 2 to Cornflower

" Disappearances "

44

Why alone of all my alphabet rhymes should Zantippe
survive ? And my consciousness, disporting as a bird, be kicked
along the earth and that terrifying thing together with some
sweetened pebbles from Brighton remain the only gifts I remember
my mother bringing me. Why did not meat great-grandmother burn
to death before so forbiddenly finding me out to bestow upon me
the sentiment of love and the right to choose---- something
beautiful? And why again should my so mysterious mother, out of
the whole Shakespeare and on opening it once for all, intone with
a voice I could not forget that awful prophecy of whom so much
should haunt me.

The devout do often, inserting a finger at random among
the pages of the Bible, find the counsel sought for in the verse
thus blindly picked; but there for the religious is stored so
inexhaustible an ethical provision, they are hardly taking chances.
Whereas, amidst the exceptional emptiness of my early youth, how
should signs and wonders take form from nothingness to appear
from nowhere? Or the casual gestures of inattentive people make
patterns precise as keys that fitted into what?

In a house filled with unrest the mistress of us all
seemed not to breathe the same disquieting air. She moved immune
among us. But once, but briefly, an unbelievable change came over
her. As if caught in a trap. As if that front door, which framed
not a few of my memories, were sealed, she now distractedly

" Disappearances"

46

less suspense gave place ,as usual, to 'fidgets'. But my mother
did not notice. She was praying so hard, sometimes to God,
sometimes addressing herself to me, as if in need of an ally.

Her anguish, so extrovert, yet this once so genuine---never
again was I to see the circumstances get the better of her ---
was so rich inn action that, although I had scarcely en idea
why she wept, I watched the unfolding of her martyrdom as if
a
from among a crowd round the stake.

I remember having prayed with her before, " God bless my
mother and my father" ---" Why" I asked "must I put my mother
first?" "Because God says you must love your mother more than anything
else in the world". So I loved her with a suspended love,
confident that sooner or later must be revealed in her its
mysterious
magnificent justification. While the bizarre emotions she pro-
voked in me I ascribed to God who so evidently made use of her
as His mouthpiece.

As we rose from our knees she clutched my wrist and hissed
a command into my ear, "You must hate your father."

Up to a certain age all the instruction we receive from our
elders must be what is loosely termed psychic. The words we
are taught , which on reflection would seem to require a wide
experience to attain their full contents, must be conveyed to
us on a sort of telepathic transmission of our elders' interpre-
tation of them. How else account for my subtle and appropriate
reactions such as the almost philosophical quandery in which
I found myself on coming across the dead egg in our summer house
when I could scarcely have been four?

Thus this word 'hate' It entered me . So dynamic with its
own significance that from the moment my mother's insistent

" Disappearances "

47

fingers pressed upon my wrist a wracking vindictiveness took
course through my veins. Provided with this impalpable weapon,
I straightened myself in readiness to redress her wrongs.

That day Was long and high, coming down from the skylight
in the roof led by a staircase backbone like a nervous system
entirely deranged. At the end of the flight, the last stairs
opened out and curved with the banister which thus seemed
beginning to curl round upon itself. If I clung to its support
so often, turning and twisting myself with its incipience, it
was because I found in it a central spool -- a spool on which
the nervous filaments that trailed their aerial poisons through-
out the house, I must wind up again; wind myself with them also
onto a centripetal axis.

For as day grew stale the atmosphere so thickened with
female vibrations errant, irritant vibrations of a home full of
women sowing the sodden inertia of my bringing up, that one
moved in it with difficulty as though ploughing through a
hostile wadding.

Till at last in the evening when I had once more sought
the refuge of the banister as one shipwrecked, cligs to a mast
in an unleashed sea, a key turned in the front door lock and
my father stood before me.

At once the wadded air receded, packed back upon itself,
as he approached me, leaving him immune in a clear square halo,
projection of the pure expanse of the momentarily opened doorway.
He moved erect and gracefully released as though he had thrown of
a burden and his smile seemed illuminated as by a solution.
As if he had decided it were henceforth impossible to mistake

" Disappearances "

48

nothing for something; realized how ridiculous 'it' had all been. And the spark of logic in his brain reacted on that hate in me like a chemical agent.

Perhaps the only 'feeling' I have never been able to lift out of the past and analyze exactly is the one that overcame me then; something no child should ever have to undergo. The psychic poison I had absorbed surged about my diaphragm while the 'whole' within me split apart and the two halves turning back to back as he picked me up. - A Judas-Janus I gave him a shamefaced smile, conscious that he was holding in his arms, that which I had not exactly comprehended until myself become one of --- a lie.

And all this while the wadding in the air continued to fall away, leaving us more and more space, more and more lifting and concentrating until ultimately contracted and condensed, it hung above his handsome dark-eyed head with an imminent heaviness of stone.

"Well, little wife," he cried, invitingly, as my mother, with her fringe all curled and in her satin bodice, descended the staircase like a wall that, although marching past us at an imposing distance, yet left us shattered as if we had crashed on our heads against its blankness, as she remarked to her husband "I wonder you have the face----".

If the adult mind, at the mercy of mystery, fumbles with phenomena the child brings an absolute assurance to its enterprises of destruction. When I approached the ornament, the candle or anything else I was about to spoil it was with the virtuosity of a past master --- But in the name of Hermes -- of what art?

282

" Disappearances "

49

The child seems to have a preconception of what it 'wills'
to create, which at a riper age remains only to genius,

Of what transformation of matter is the child prescient?
What ultimate subject is it sure of making out of almost nothing?
This inverted creator who cannot let well alone, all its anti-
cipations appear to miscarry in breakage and sudden mess. Yet xxx
nowhere occurs more rocketing surprise or deeper discouragement
than that of a little child, who, when struck with an unexpected
impotence also begins to fumble,

Evidently it is not informed of the laws governing matter, b
but as we watch it we could almost swear it has been accustomed to
a different order. It always seems to be seeking something that
must have disappeared,

We may suppose it to be very much of a monkey; that all this
is symptomatic of the riddance of attavism such as it is said to
enable the newly-born to hang by one hand from a bough. But what
is this monkey bent on detroying the mechanisms proper to its
own future as if it does not find them perhaps sufficiently
convincing. The mystic tenacity with which it guards its seemingly
idiotic treasures suggests that all religious wars and wrangles
may originate in this infantile conviction of possessing the best
magic,

To one who cannot find the way we point out the direction, so
this stranger is put through a harrowing discipline to eliminate
the peculiar principle of its useless activity; an interference
necessitated by some sadistic evolutional experiment to which child
and preceptor are submitted allike. Its final reclamation from an
ante-factual awareness coincides with the extinction of that inde-
finable luminosity distinguishing it from the adult.

" Disappearances "

50

Until the crisis in which it exchanges its universe for
ours the child is not only alive but alight.

Intact in its qualities; responding only to beauty, joyous
without rhyme for its joy, heroic unneedful of arms for its
heroism; its April dolors only real as rehearsals of a future it
tries to postpone, the child is prompted by a clear reasoning
than ours, to avoid the perils and disgraces we hold out to it,
and to linger in an unseen region it inhabits staked beyond fear.

As soon as it gets into our real world, it is frightened in
the dark of dangers threatening from the rear, and this may be in
memory of primeval ancestors or the first remonstrance having
sprung on it from behind. It is also possible that it feels hampere
in its facilities for self-protection by its blind back that has
slammed like a shutter on a lost dimension.

Probably my intension when I stuck my fingers into the night
light was to gather its flame as one would the bud of a flower.

Price's night-lights sent to earth in a heavenly carton covered
with mystic stars of blue, were packed in rows and looked like co-
nic mountain-crests of mythic ice.

The remorse that overcame me was measureless when, the tiny
stiff capsizing in immaculate grease, the light went out,

I had not only extinguished the illuminant of my toy-world
but as a night-light has also its import in the adult world this
accident would give rise to questions I felt myself incapable of
answering----.

Timeless night could draw out no more indefinitely for a
contrite murderer trying to bring a corpse back to life than this
midnight I had blackened--- this hour at which I had never before

" Disappearances"

51

been awake -- as, lit by the sparse filter of moon through the
cotton blind, I attempted over and over to set that wick up again.
All my efforts remaining fruitless, I set out to seek a burial pl
place for the lump of white wax I had utterly misshapen with my
fumbling. Strips of dimness from windows led me wandering per-
plexity along passages that, in the depth of shadow, streched into
endless corridors. Desperate at last, although horrified at so
unfitting a grave, I threw the cadaver of beauty down the lavatory

Shortly after this I began to walk in my sleep.

whip
Anxiety is a circus - master cracking his , exercising the
noctambulist -- up to the roof , down to the cellar--- to batter
on iron bolts of entrances. The smallest children inhabit the
greatest buildings.

Escape --- not from danger but from the dread of it. Menace
is potent to create that which is greater than itself, so many
who have been put to flight are unaware of what they would flee
from. I remember the unreal seeming of objects which, static by
day, assume mobility among the shifty hangings of the dark.

Before the fixation of my eyes that are wide-asleep the hall
lies in a pit of half spent light . The fanlike edges of the marble
stairs, a pale dissection of distance unfurling from the tessellat
door, lay their cold planes uder my naked feet . Beyond an open
door the deathly damask of a table-cloth is surrounded by ghostly
chairs.

In my silent somnambulist petrified world, angles play
acrobat on a precursory silver screen until the automaton,
halted by the heavy bolts on the street door, staring up at an ope

["\" Disappearances \"", "52", "fau light awakens for I cannot fly.", "Whenever we took temporary quarters for holiday time\nthe asphyxiating atmosphere of conjugal crime would lift and,\nlike a rift in a cloud, --- arrival at furnished apartments\nwould always reveal some object of unguessed beauty, or strike a note of the cosmic harmony that never penetrated our home ---\nSo I lie in my bed at Sundown listening to the boats being drawn up\nout of the surf onto the beach. An effortless bound of the end\nof day, a crunching too compliant to be rasping, for the ocean\nhad left something of itself among the pebbles that made their\nsubsiding among one another so slippery, it eased the ride of\nthe craft.", "I am aroused from the spell of this unaccustomed lullaby\nwhen my sight settles on the curtain-pole above the window that,\nfacing me, lets in the dusk. The end of the pole is ornamented\nwith a glass lily--- or trumpet. It is one of the very few beautiful things I have found in the world.", "Glass is scarcely white--- it is of a whiteness so\ntenuous as to have evaporated through itself, leaving transparency.\nAs, since long ages crystal is pregnant with eyes evoking visions,\nthis lofty glitter lures me--- Wisdom effects the transparencies of all things --- when off a sudden the lily disappears\nin a loud explosion ---", "You clumsy slut! How did you chip the wash basin ?\nIt will be put on the bill" --- the very voice of vengeance."]

" Disappearances "

53

" Now I shant give you the nice treat I had in store for you--
--a ride in the chaise with the white goat ---" And the coveted
goat, laden with my sin wandering away into the desert of that
which shall never come to pass, dissolves into the white dimity
of the curtains.

Interrupted by these punitive vibrations, the sound of the
beaching of boats ceases to be soothing ---If the barque of the
soul be drawn out of the ocean of potency, what is the chart of
the voyage it shall make? --- I am a radium becoming lead.
Looking back to the pole for the transparent object of my wonder
-- I see it in its cloudy now as if it had been breathed upon by a
wrong breath.

'This is the voice of the glass trumpet'. I listen as it says in silence, and receive a sorrow.

Alas, this transparence is but the echo of light.

Receiving all things into itself for strange interpretations

In this even the sun is become a contortionist and beauty,
brokenness --- assuming ephemeral travesties.

Of itself only an invitation to a shadow. It's finale ---
^ to filter a blank wall.

To what can be likened this volume that is only to be
located in its reflections?

" Disappearances "

54

The past is dead as an outgrown superstition, a mummy
with a thousands features crumbled into dust of which every now
and again a grain blows into the eye of memory ---.

Our little 'boots' I no longer see tells me in front
of the fowl house, how the mother hen feeds her primrose little
ones with milk under her wing; while on this brief impression
is superposed a <u>time</u> pair of pipe-clay Wellington boots he gave
me for a present at quite a different time. While again this
coincidence of associated ideas dissolves into my long, long
ago sensation of having quite close to me an aspiration akin
to my own, an innocence groping among nebulous conditions that
frustrated the poor little boot-boy. Like a fruit whose <u>rim</u> flesh
has fallen away, his kernel lies in my path.

["\" Disappearances \"", "52", "light awakens for I cannot fly.", "Whenever we took temporary quarters for holiday time\nthe asphyxiating atmosphere of conjugal crime would lift and,\nlike a rift in a cloud, --- arrival at furnished apartments\nwould always reveal some object of unguessed beauty, or strike a note\nof the cosmic harmony that never penetrated our home ---\nSo I lie in my bed at Sundown listening to the boats being drawn up\nout of the surf onto the beach. An effortless sound of the end\nof day, a crunching too compliant to be rasping, for the ocean\nhad left something of itself among the pebbles that made their\nsubsiding among one another so slippery, it eased the ride of\nthe craft.", "I am aroused from the spell of this unaccustomed lullaby\nwhen my sight settles on the curtain-pole above the window that,\nfacing me, lets in the dusk. The end of the pole is ornamented\nwith a glass lily-- or trumpet. It is one of the very few beautiful\nthings I have found in the world.", "Glass is scarcely white--- it is of a whiteness so\ntenuous as to have evaporated through itself, leaving transparency.\nAs, since long ages crystal is pregnant with eyes evoking visions,\nthis lofty glitter lures me--- Wisdom effects the transparencies of all things\n--- when off a sudden the lily disappears\nin a loud explosion ---", "You clumsy slut! How did you chip the wash basin ?\nIt will be put on the bill" --- the very voice of vengeance."]

" Disappearances "

53

" Now I shant give you the nice treat I had in store for you--
--a ride in the chaise with the white goat ---" And the coveted
goat, laden with my sin wandering away into the desert of that
which shall never come to pass, dissolves into the white dimity
of the curtains. On this interruption

Interrupted by these punitive vibrations, the sound of the
beaching of boats ceases to be soothing --- If the barque of the
soul be drawn out of the ocean of potency, what is the chart of
the voyage it shall make? --- I am a radium becoming lead.
Looking back to the pole for the transparent object of my wonder
-- I see it as cloudy now as if it had been breathed upon by a
wrong breath.

'This is the voice of the glass trumpet'. I listen as it says this silence, and receive a sorrow.

In this even the sun is become a contortionist and beauty,
brokenness assuming spherical travesties.

Of itself only an invitation to a shadow. It's finale--
to filter a blank wall.

" Disappearances "

54

The past is dead as an outgrown superstition, a mummy
with a thousand features crumbled into dust of which every now
and again a grain blows into the eye of memory ---.

Our little 'boots' I no longer see tells me in front
of the fowl house, how the mother hen feeds her primrose little
ones with milk under her wing; while on this brief impression
penny is superposed a fine pair of pipe-clay Wellington boots he gave
me for a present at quite a different time. While again this
coincidence of associated ideas dissolves into my long, long
ago sensation of having quite close to me an aspiration akin
to my own, an innocence groping among nebulous conditions that
frustrated the poor little boot-boy. Like a fruit whose rind
has fallen away, his kernel lies in my path.

PART III

The Fitful Life of Memory

CHAPTER

Disappearances

The past is like a sleeping ocean on which the trivial
wreckage of chance events drift seemingly without an aim towards a
common haven, where, as if fallen half way into the glue of re-
membrance, the puppets of old acquaintances bob up at odd moments to
be plunged anew under a forgotten tide. Whole years which were
inevitably fully occupied are wiped completely out, while haphazard
instants will remain with us always as if waiting for the discovery
of the hidden significance that bade them survive.

Disappearances - 2

Understanding that all operative objects have magical
properties for small creatures like myself, he showed me an enormous
magnet. I can see the new vermillion of its lean horseshoe and
and how, with the passing of years, its size has decreased its signif-
cause it becom
enormous human?

This 'instantaneous' of my English maternal grandfather
blows out in a puff of condescension given off by my mother, and
on that same pff his wife some months later settles in an uncommodious
posture on the apple green plush of a flimsy gilt chair in our
drawing room.

Roads whose old walls have trees casting shade over them
are hospitable; one's thoughts as one lingers along in their gentle
dust are not returned to one empty. They bring in a branch, a moss

Disappearances - 4

To leave it alone seemed so heartless. Yet if I tried to bury it, it would drip before I could. I did not know Time yet and it seemed to lie there for a thousand years until I dare not go near that summer house again. It was haunted.

After vaguely intuiting a manner of battle between a woman and a building-- the battle field is littered and we move away-- onto a square of sunlight the window has laid on the nursery floor. In relation to me the window itself is high as in a prisoner's cell, but my mother has come down to me on the carpet. Absorbed in the act of creation, I hardly notice the unusual shape she assumes in sitting beside me. I am putting the finishing touches to an exact reproduction of my symbol of my baby sister-- a feeding bottle I had somewhere seen steeped with its indiarubber tube in a pan of water. Inspired and painstaking I have perfected it, moulding it as it were out of the first plastic material that came to hand and am holding it out to invite my mother's admiration of its translucent body and shaky neck, when a loud rapping startles the trivial scene into permanence. The door in the distance says, "if you please mam, Mrs.

Di appearances - 10

with its stirrip too large, its reins too broad, for as it was not
there it was a excitingly incompatible with reality as my own xx
visionary inventions. But my mother could not countenance his cheating
a little child. She upbraided him for his cruelty, and, lowering her
deep upperlip on disdain too profound to express, she sent me up to
bed and resumed her meditative stroll.

When I was half undressed, she came running into the nursery
to show us "a dear little bird" she had found that had fallen out
of its nest. "I kept kicking it along the grass" she said. "I mistook
it for a bit of red flannel." There it lay, mauled to a pulp, of
that queerly putrid quality that bird flesh has without its feathers,
an ancient and sarcastic look on its dying eye and monstrous beak.
"When I found it was a bird," my mother continued brightly, "I thought,
'Oh, I must take it indoors to show the children-- How they will love
to see it.'"

Disappearances - 12

perhaps of all realities, an aged woman, appearing as if from
nowhere to totter towards me on superanuated &iny sinewy feet.

She also has the starkness of images and is covered with black
brocade and bugles, all fringed and lacy; her bonnet encloses her
head in a crescent and is tied under her chin with almost that
violaceous shrill proper to Episcopal silk.

Her brows are lifted in the triangular mystification
one finds on the faces of old jewesses whose mouths are become
pursed in a racial patience to kiss their legendary progeny on ar-
rival in long-promised lands.

She is so thin, so straight. The copious wave of her
jet black hair might be that of a doll who is kept in a drawer.
Before her noble narrowness her tremulous hands spired as if in
prayer as she peers at me unpoint and part to patter upon my face,
and raising the vessels of these tears that fall on me, in praise
to Iahwen, she chokes, "Mein schönes Kind."

At once a bestowal and a reception the unctious schöbn
in the unvanquished croon of an ancestry over its foredoomed off-
spring soothes me and swathes me for once in the nomadic embrace.
A fallen fledgling I am picked up and the aching quills are redressed.

Dis appearances - 13

my one adoration
This single envelopment in my paternal grandmother's
conveyed
adoration bequeathed to me a strangely emotional phenomenon which
I am sure must be what in the old Testament is described as "his
bowels melted within him," and that as there is an amorous orgasm,
which is the juncture of our sensibility with cosmic sentience;
so there is a spiritual orgasm, the mystic's admittance to cosmic
radiance, an intellectual one immingling with the intelligent
ether, an aesthetic one on our impact with any of the myriad facets
of cosmic beauty, so there is an orgasm of loving-compassion, the
lust of the humane, which may be common in a race whose love for
it self must at length have become inseparable from the uttermost com-
passion.

Dis appearances - 15

............Instead of which her night dress catches fire as she reaches for her medicine on the mantel-piece. And the grandmother whose 'little' name I bear, who had already looked so started living alone with her foreign language in the street at the back of ours, opened her window screaming, "Fire!" for a fire engine, while the draught flapped up the yellow flames as they fed on her hounded body.

--00000--

Some lives are so lacking in material for conversation one can even imagine a rudimentary family only aroused to social intercourse by the opening of the front door. A face is lifted. A voice inquires, "Going out?" ......."So you've come in?" almost with animation, for a temporary escape from over-familiar circumstances favors the possibility that an absentee may, like the primitive hunter returning to his cave with a carcass, capture an incident to be shared with those who remained at home.

So mother would always, when we went out for our walks or came back, appear from whichever room she happened to be in waiting in, probably charging her batteries for her encounters. As little peasants who, espying unusual tourists at the turning of

Disappearances - 17

hands to do," I did not notice the difference.

One afternoon, however, mother was occupied and we were 'taken in' to say goodbye to her. She was lying on a sofa with a book. "Come here," she said, and-pointing to an engraving,—saw at the top of her page something vague that was wrapped in a sheet,— "and look at Shakespeare." Hamlet, I am thy father's ghost."

But there was nothing uncanny about this quotation at the time. All it conveyed to me was that my mother was feeling very wise and pleasantly communicative. A beam of light filtered through the meshes of a curtain and played about her head as she kissed me goodbye. But now, after nearly half a century, almost an eeriness creeps over me as, each in turn, so many accidental recollections, rising like shades to an incantation, assume eventually their ominous significance.

Why alone of all my alphabet should Zantippe survive?
And my consciousness, disporting as a bird, be kicked along the
earth and that terrifying thing be the only offering I remember

Disappearances - 18

my mother ever to have brought me. Why did not my grandmother burn
to death before so forbiddenly finding me out to bestow upon me
the sentiment of love and the right to choose-- something beautiful?
And why again should my so mysterious mother, out of the whole
Shakespeare and once for all, intone with a voice I could not forget
that awful prophecy of whom so much should haunt me.

The devout do often, inserting a finger at random among
the pages of the Bible, find the counsel sought for in the verse
thus blindly picked; but there for the religious is stored so
inexhaustible an ethical provision, they are hardly taking chances.
Whereas, amidst the exceptional emptiness of my early youth, how
should signs and wonders take form from nothingness to appear from
nowhere? Or the casual gestures of inattentive people make
patterns precise as keys that fitted into *what*?

In a house filled with unrest the mistress of us all
seemed not to breathe the same disquieting air. She moved immune
among us. But once, but briefly, an unbelievable change came over
her. As if caught in a trap, as if that front door, which framed
not a few of my memories, were sealed, she now distractedly seemed

Disappearances - 19

to dash diagonally, hither and thither, her hair disarranged, re-
bounding in all directions on impact with unseen frontiers im-
prisoning her.

hauteur
hut

The muscular hauteur of a stubborn face had melted in a
fever of apprehension to a limp mask sagging from the stark anatomy
of terror.

Her lids from which she eyed the world with a peculiarly
blind shrewdness, I have never seen elsewhere, were pink. She was
spattered with tears, and the sanguine flush (that so often crept
up her throat from her poor rabid heart to splosh upon her cheek
while the rest of her face, drained of all normal color, showed
the same waxen lividness as blood-poisoning), now suffused her
entirely, as is usual with people swayed by a natural emotion un-
connected with more mysterious cataclysms of the circulatory system.

Then she slowed down as if a different angle of her mad-
dening concern were penetrating her-- at last she clutched hold of
my wrist and, forcing me to my knees before the first of a row of
carved oak chairs, knelt down beside me. "Pray with me," she urged.
"Oh, pray to God to bring back your father," and, wringing her
hands in desperation, she cried out of a shattering sob "Where would

Di appearames - 20

I _be_ without any money?

So we prayed in line with the empty chairs against the
dining room wall in the interior gloom of those days with their
imitation tapestry draperies lined with sateen, their ball fringe,
their baldequins and their thick guipure curtains that covered the
windows while the machine-turned carving of the chair back confronted
me with the likeness of nothing I could possibly presume to be God.
And after waiting obediently for something tangible to define itself
in this strange undertaking, my patience under this fruitless
suspense gave place, as usual, to 'fidgets'. But my mother did
not notice. She was praying so hard, sometimes to God, sometimes
addressing herself to me, as if in need of an ally.

Her anguish, so extrovert, yet this once so genuine--
never again was I to see circumstances get the better of her--
was so rich in action that, although I had scarcely an idea why
she wept, I watched the unfolding of her martyrdom as if from among
a crowd round a stake.

I remember having prayed with her before, "God bless my
mother and my father"-- "Why," I had asked "must I put mother first?"
"Because God says you must love your mother more than anything

Disappearances - 21

else in the world.' So I loved her with a suspended love, confident
that sooner or later must be revealed in her its magnificent
justification. While the bizarre commotions she provoked in me
I ascribed to God who so evidently made use of her as his mouthpiece.

As we rose from our knees she clutched my wrist and hissed
that man he's not
a command into my ear, "You must <u>hate</u> your father."

Up to a certain age all the instruction we receive from
our elders must be what is loosely termed psychic. The words we are
taught, which on reflection would seem to require a ripe experience
to attain their full contents, must be conveyed to us on a sort of
telepathic transmission of our elders' interpretation of them. How
else account for my subtle and appropriate reactions such as the
almost philosophical quandary in which I found myself on coming
across the dead egg in our summer house, when I could scarcely have
been four?

Thus this word 'hate.' It entered me. So dynamic with
its own significance that from the moment my mother's insistent fingers
pressed upon my wrist a wracking vindictiveness took course through
my veins. Provided with this impalpable weapon, I straightened

Disappearances - 23

At once the wadded air receded, packed back upon itself,
as he approached me, leaving him *immune* in a clear square halo,
magnified duplicate of the pure expanse of the momentarily opened
doorway.

He moved erect and gracefully released as though he had
thrown off a burden and his smile seemed illumined as by a solution.
As if he had decided it were henceforth impossible to mistake
nothing for something; realized how ridiculous 'it' had all been.
And the spark of logic in his brain reacted on that hate in me
like a chemical agent.

Perhaps the only 'feeling' I have never been able to lift
out of the past and analyze was the one that overcame me then; some-
thing no child should ever have to undergo. The psychic poison I

Disappearances - 25

pair of pipe-clay Wellington boots he made me a present of at quite
a different time. While again this coincidence of associated ideas
dissolves into only my long, long ago sensation of having quite
close to me an aspiration akin to my own, an innocence groping among
nebulous conditions that frustrated the poor little boot-boy. Like
a fruit whose rind has fallen away, his kernel lies in my path.

Disappearances - 6

There is a black cloth column standing by the cradle that
breaks over my invisible sister, and, hushed as the lamp-light, a voice
speaks out of it, XXXX saying--- "Iarrhea, mam--- it is quite green."

---- the layer of dark mystery whence anything may issue has risen
from the region of human feet to those inaccessible plains where
only flies can crawl, for the light from the windows, opening out
like a fan, does not enter the angle of wall and ceiling packed with
the slats of raised venetian blinds.

The trend of something bossed directs my eyes to that
sombre barrier dividing the bright expanses of whitewash and curtain
with an impenetrable strip of shadow, and all in a swish, two slight
silhouettes clatter down from the cornice, turning upon themselves
and flap onto the floor. "Oho" cries my mother, who must have come
in from the door behind me, "The fairies have sent you a surprise.
Let us see what it is."

Dis appearances - 10

with its stirrup too large, its reins too broad, for as it was *not*
*there* it was as excitingly incompatible with reality as my own ix
visionary inventions. But my mother could not countenance his cheating
a little child. She upbraided him for his cruelty, and, lowering her
deep upperlip on disdain too profound to express, she sent me up to
bed and resumed her meditative stroll.

Disappearances - 12 D.D.

perhaps of all realities, an aged woman, appearing as if from
nowhere to totter towards me on superanuated tiny sinewy feet.
She also has the starkness of images and is covered with black
brocade and bugles, all fringed and lacy; her bonnet encloses her
head in a crescent and is tied under her chin with almost that
violaceous shrill proper to Episcopal silk.

Her brows are lifted in the triangular mystification
one finds on the faces of old jeweases whose mouths are become
pursed in a racial patience to kiss their legendary progeny on ar-
rival in long-promised lands.

She is so thin, so straight. The copious wave of her
jet black hair might be that of a doll who is kept in a drawer.
Before her noble narrowness her tremulous hands spired as if in
prayer as she peers at me unpoint and part to patter upon my face,
and raising the vessels of these tears that fall on me, in praise
to Iahweh, she chokes, "Mein schönes Kind."

At once a bestowal and a reception the unctious schön
in the unvanquished croon of an ancestry over its foredoomed off-
spring soothes me and swathes me for once in the nomadic embrace.
A fallen fledgling I am picked up and the aching quills are redressed.

Dis appearances - 13

EE

This single envelopment in my paternal grandmother's adoration bequeathed to me a strangely emotional phenomenon which I am sure must be what in the old Testament is described as "his bowels melted within him," and that as there is an amorous orgasm which is the juncture of our sensibility with cosmic sentience, so there is a spiritual orgasm, the mystic's admittance to cosmic radiance, an intellectual one immingling with the intelligent ether, an aesthetic one on our impact with any of the myriad facets of cosmic beauty, so there is an orgasm of loving compassion, the lust of the humane, which may be common in a race whose love for it self must at length have become inseparable from the uttermost compassion.

Disappearances - 16

a lane, will jump out and mock them, she had always something ex-
tremely disturbing to say, thus adding to my discomfort stuck in
too many clothes all rammed into a coat that was rather tight for
me.

Once, as I waited in the shadows of the hall, having
absent-mindedly, in spite of urgent instruction as to macabre
consequences, succombed to the child instinct to reabsorb into itself
the whole universe, and an accident befell me. I swalled my
indiarubber.

I was very frightened and, looking about me in hope of
help, or at least some consolation on my departure from this earth,
all I encountered was what looked to me, considering the circum-
stances, a heinous glint in my mother's eye. "What a wicked girl,"
she crowed, "crying because you've swallowed an indiarubber. You
ought to be glad to go to heaven and be a little angel."

This was the only time it was ever suggested I might
not end up in hell. But as my nurse (for it was quite a small
erasor from the end of a tin pencil-holder) immediately pushed me
into the street with a "Satan finds some mischief still for idle

Disappearances - 18

my mother ever brought me. Why did not my grandmother burn
to death before so forbiddenly finding me out to bestow upon me
the sentiment of love and the right to choose-- something beautiful?
And why again should my so mysterious mother, out of the whole
Shakespeare and once for all, intone with a voice I could not forget
that awful prophecy of whom so much should haunt me.

In a house filled with unrest the mistress of us all
seemed not to breathe the same disquieting air. She moved immune
among us. But once, but briefly, an unbelievable change came over
her. As if caught in a trap. As if that front door, which framed
not a few of my memories, were sealed, she now distractedly seemed

Disappearances - 19

to dash diagonally, hither and thither, her hair disarranged, rebounding in all directions on impact with unseen frontiers imprisonment her.

The muscular徒 of a stubborn face had melted in a fever of apprehension to a limp mask sagging from the stark anatomy of terror.

Her lids from which she eyed the world with a peculiarly blind shrewdness, I have never seen elsewhere, were pink. She was spattered with tears, and the sanguine flush (that so often crept up her throat from her poor rabid heart to splosh upon her cheek while the rest of her face, drained of all normal color, showed the same waxen lividness as blood-poisoning), now suffused her entirely, as is usual with people swayed by a natural emotion unconnected with more mysterious cataclysms of the circulatory system.

Then she slowed down as if a different angle of her madening concern were penetrating her-- at last she clutched hold of my wrist and, forcing me to my knees before the first of a row of carved oak chairs, knelt down beside me. "Pray with me," she urged. "Oh, pray to God to bring back your father," and, wringing her hands in desperation, she cried out of a shattering sob "Where would

Disappearances - 21

else in the world." So I loved her with a suspended love, confident
that sooner or later must be revealed in her its magnificent
justification. While the bizarre commotions she provoked in me
I ascribed to God who so evidently made use of her as his mouthpiece.

As we rose from our knees she clutched my wrist and hissed
a command into my ear, "You must <u>hate</u> your father."

Up to a certain age all the instruction we receive from
our elders must be what is loosely termed psychic. The words we are
taught, which on reflection would seem to require a ripe experience
to attain their full contents, must be conveyed to us on a sort of
telepathic transmission of our elders' interpretation of them. How
else account for my subtle and appropriate reactions such as the
almost philosophical quandary in which I found myself on coming
across the <u>dead</u> egg in our summer house, when I could scarcely have
been four?

Disappearances - 22

myself up in readiness to redress her wrongs.

That day was long and high, coming down from the skylight in the roof led by a staircase backbone like a nervous system entirely deranged. At the end of the flight, the last stairs opened out and curved with the banister which thus seemed beginning to curl round upon itself. If I clung to its support so often, turning an twisting myself with this incipience, it was because I found in it a central spool-- a spool on which the nervous filaments that trailed their aerial poisons throughout the house, I must wind up again; wind myself with them also onto a centripetal axis.

Till at last in the evening when I had once more sought the refuge of the banister as one shipwrecked, clings to a mast in an unleashed sea, a key turned in the front door lock and my father stood before me.

Disappearances - 24

had absorbed surged about my diaphragm while the 'whole' within me split a part and the two halves turned back to back as he picked me up. - A judas-janus I gave him a shamefaced smile, conscious that he was holding in his arms, that which I had not exactly comprehended until myself become so (one)?-- a lie.

And all this while the wadding in the air continued to fall away, leaving us more and more space, more and more lifting and concentrating until ultimately contracted and condensed, it hung above his handsome dark-eyed head with the heavy luminance of stone.

"Well, little wife," he cried, invitingly, as my mother, with her fringe all curled and in her satiny bodice, descended the staircase like a wall that, although marching past us at an imposing distance, yet left us shattered as if we had crashed our heads against its blankness, as she remarked to her husband, "I wonder you have the face----."

The past is dead as an outgrown superstition, a mummy with a thousand features crumbled into dust of which every now and again a grain blows into the eye of memory-----.

Our little 'boots' I no longer see tells me in front of the fowl house, how the mother hen feeds her primrose little ones with milk while on this brief impression is superposed a fine under her wing;

Disappearances - 25

" Islands in the Air "

CHAPTER VII

ETHICS AND HYGIENE OF NIGHTMARE

My father who will spend his time doing the same thing over and over, is reading the daily Telegraph --- Once a newspaper, always a newspaper. Why go on staring at it? I am after something new! His legs are crossed and the toe of one of his carpet slippers is pointing a woolen cross-stitch rose straight at a work table. There is a fancy basket standing on it I have not seen before.

I find that this basket is filled with fat white glass-eyed fishes their scales & their ribs on their fins painted aniline pink; soft as cotton-wool, they have a thin crisp surface---it is as if my hands were full of a light warm snow.

Father looks out from behind his paper and remarks confidentially, " We musn't tell Auntie Mary you peeped at her Japanese fishes. She meant them for a surprise."

That evening when my nurse brought me into the drawing room, the powerful masses of Miss Gunne and my parents were grouped round the fireplace. The black bars of the grate withheld a pile of glowing jewels from falling upon their feet while I advanced towards a wall of flame. I could feel these great dark silhouettes as they sat there in the dusk to be concerted in an intention to spring upon me. They were flashing messages to each other in a code of connivance.

"Ethics & Hygiene of Nightmare"

56

"Did you peep into Aunty Mary's basket?" my father asked
me, and his eye reflected a hot gleam from a burning coal.

Seeing how Auntie Mary's, with her finely plaited basket
on her knees, clutched it with almost convulsive protection in
her feelings. I answered, "No".

As if this word were a signal confidently awaited, the
upper halves of their bodies bolted out of their huge arm-chairs.
The rosy gleam on Miss Gunne's white hair, the copper edge of
my father's crinkly beard, and the embers in my mother's eye-
glasses hung over me as supernatural embodiments of destiny
might lean menacing out of an incongruously low sky.

"That's a lie", my father exclaimed in a voice of chuck-
ling severity, appreciative of a scene he had evidently prepare
with his companions. "You know very well I saw you do it myself."

The word 'lie' seemed to release their sonority, and the
voice I had heard for the first time when the dominoe mira-
culously flew through the window gathered in volume above the
staccato of the other voices' chattering of hell. It no longer
detonated on a lofty plane. Now it was hissing out of a real
person while I was *quite really* a bit of a person and the fire
was hot on my face.

A lie was obviously the contrary of what actually 'occurs'
I had said 'No' in compliance with my father's request. If I
did not remind him that he had asked me not to tell, it was
something
because I succumbed their necessity to make out of me that they
knew how to'deal with it. (Does not society create its own
criminals?) Or rather because animosity always stabbed me in

57

the solar plexus, causing a knotted agony that paralyzed self-defense. All I could realize was the impossibility of extricating myself intact from intrigues in which I found myself very much ~~my~~ (was very much that) ~~of~~ a in the situation of the foot-ball in rugby scrimmage.

I must make my escape. So I merely told them I could stay with them no longer --- that I was going away.

"All right, run along," they agreed most sensibly, "We dont want a liar here".

Obligingly, the front door was opened for me --- I rushed out and ran along Melville Terrace. On the one hand stood a row of brown-brick houses, one of which was mine. On the other, a demilune of thickly planted lilac trees hedged the curved drive that swept in and out of the gates.

As I breathed the drip of the lately fallen rain loaded with the aroma of the lilacs, its freshening of the pebbles in the gravel, the balm of earth had already begun to heal the concussion of my nerve centers in this atmosphere so different in nature to the one that filled the brown brick box I had left--- when a heavy, arresting hand clamped itself on my frail shoulder--- they did want a liar.

The ultimate difficulty of ascribing guilt to the proper quarter necessitated the conception of the devil --- for however we may search for the inspiration of that evil which gets mysteriously mixed up with so many of our deeds, we can seldom locate it. It is, seemingly, the result of impersonal causes over which we have little control.

8 58

Thus the riddle as to how, at any time, and unwittingly,
innocence may change into guiltiness came up again when one
Autumn Sunday afternoon my good-looking father, faultlessly
dressed, indulged in a much - earned pleasure of taking his dear
little girl for a walk.

On our return, he complained of how I had laid me down
on the pavement and, kicking and screaming, demanded to be
taken home in a hansom cab. I took great interest in my father's
narrative, listening open-mouthed as if to an account of the
incredible performance of some stranger; I was quite as horrified
as were my elders by this evil deed. I had not the least recol-
lection of the hideous occurence --- did not even know if my
father had succeded in getting me home without a cab or whether
he hailed one to bear him away with his utter confusion. Yet,
contrary to the time when the window' got broken or when I told
a lie, I was not bewildered by the accusation. It left me
undisturbed except for a slight remorse. No stab of injustice
wounded my solar plexus for, in spite of having immediately
forgotten what I had done, I knew that all my father was saying
about me was strictly true. So if my sort of extra-dimensional
existence is a thing of the past, it appears I am capable of a
new, and strange automatism, whose actions, as if beyond my control,
are contrary to the ethical consciousness I had supposed to be the
only one I possessed, and that this unsuspected automat
within me had begun to sin. It seemed that this sin was the
desire to identify myself with beauty, the beauty of the jingling
swiftness of a cab on two wheels. But what was the nature of a

desire that could fling me down on the stone lid of a civilized
earth as one possessed of a devil, a desire that could scream
for a jaunty conveyance which, half an hour later, I could not recall
having coveted, an impulse whose consequence must be
related by some body else for me to get even a second hand
spectator's impression that I had ever harbored it. The one thing
I remembered, and that ineffaceably, was the way the hard stone
of the pavement seemed to attenuate and fuse with the mist that
was lowered upon it, as if of itself giving off a sort of static
steam the hushed lethargic opacity of a respectable London street.
on a Sunday afternoon in late autumn.

Another problem in guiltiness presented itself to me,
when, owing this time to my entire mystification I felt neither
the anguish of false accusation or a blank conviction of my cul-
pability, I was standing at the head of a staircase swinging my
right leg like a pendulum in time to a tune I hummed. An esoteric
importance so often invoked in the actions of childhood, attached
to the seemingly negligible detail that it was my right leg.
As if to replace the subconscious doubles of other people that
had early faded away, I now hedged myself in with inexplicable
taboos I invented for myself, unknowing that human society had
prepared sufficient for me. There were so many objects I must never
first touch without bowing seven times to them and I could not eat
peas because the mark where the tiny stalk had been broken off
looked like a mouth. They must be boiled fairies who, having been
previously bewitched, might with luck at any moment burst out of
their green shrouds in their veritable form. At first I selected
only a few that had rolled among the gravy and potatoes 'mouth up

60

so that the fairies positively pleaded with me to save them
on the side of my plate --- but I soon discovered that all
peas have mouths.

Bearing directly on the episode of the staircase was
the affection I had developped for lost causes. It seemed
shamefully unfair to me, for instance, that such general
preferance should be shown for the right-hand side. I would
pick up the left-hand side with my sensibility and nurse it in
my astral arms like a doll, croon to it and make ugly faces
on its behalf at the aristocratic right that AXE gave itself
such airs. For this, it was my right leg that was swung in the
air, I allowing myself insofar as possible the use of only
left hand things; it was wearing my left hand shoe, by the way,
for its greater humiliation.

I swung and hummed, watching the housemaid who knelt at
the foot of the staircase ' putting back the rods' --- when
suddenly she capped her hands to her face and screamed,
" you wicked gal, I'll tell yer mar ya kicked me in the eye".

This was extraordinary, for I had had no sensation like
the one I dimly remembered of being able to take contact with
objects out of my reach, and I looked at that space between me
and the housemaid to see if it had fits of folding up. It
never budged. As for my leg, it had now for some time remai-
ned at the normal length of about one stair and a half. No,
there it was, the same as usual, wearing the very gaiter that
had brought me into the world. The whole thing remained inex-
plicable until when, some decades later, I came to write it

61

down.

These different aspects of moral responsibility made me curious as to the laws governing the *fixation* of guilt, it occurred to me that if misdeeds I had not perpetrated could be accounted to me, I had the right to lay claim to somebody else's guilt if it so pleased me.

I had a long and tearful argument with a nurse over a defective poultice she had laid on my throat, when, on discovering in my bed what looked like a remarkably tidy turd, I claimed the authorship of the most heinous of infant misdemeanors not at all of my habit, while she insisted on depriving me of a distinct satisfaction that self-conscious Christian hysteria, whose ' mea culpa ' at once pleasant and painful, is a compensation for so much inhibited normal self-expression --- with the assurance that she had not folded the poultice properly and so some linseed had rolled out.

The early summer evening was so shiny, and, exceptionally, this nurse so tender and consolatory, I could not be sure if I felt impelled to enfever this serenity with that moral turpitude incessantly attributed to me, if I was making a noisy bid for furhter demonstrations of a rare affection, or whether, in conse- of my cerebral routine, my mind had already begun to conform auto- matically to a rhythm of recurrent culpability.

The anxiety of such precocious introspection, winding itself up until, as a clock, ticking uninterruptedly through time, would function continually ---even through the occasional hours of relaxation and entertainment.

"Rthics & Hygiene of Nightmare"

62

When I entered her bedroom to say good morning to mama---
this was when we were at home again--- she lay in the shadow
of a screen that was covered with a woven foliage of several kinds
of nut-bearing branches. As I drew near she told me to bring her
the smelling salts.

It was rather dark and on my difficult expedition I hurt
my hand, exclaiming---.

Instantly that dreaded voice leapt out of the thick air
conserved by heavy curtains, so like a lash it almost whipped
me off my balance where I stood on a puffy sofa, my arm upraised
to turn up the gas.

"You wicked girl," it cried, inflating the 'wicked' until
it entirely encompassed me. "What sort of a mind have you got?
Using the language of a lot of low scavengers?"

"I'm sick and tired of trying to teach you to behave like
a little lady."

"How can I make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?" it
enquired,

"You're a downright disgrace to me."

While I was recovering from the stabbing surprise that
distracted attention, the voice leapt on, gaining like a moun-
tain goat, successive footholds on various rocky themes.

I heard it say, "The eye of God seeth thee". Also,
"Day and night it watcheth over thee --. It's no use trying to
hide from it, you shiftless, good-for-nothing lazy lout! He'll
punish you!"

" Ethics & Hygiene of Nightmare"

Again, it was saying, "Nice children are born in cabbages.
You were found under a stinging nettle! "

And again, " A good ducking in the horse-pond is what _you_ require. "

There followed a long analysis which brought up my 'filthy hypocrisy' --.

" You're sweet enough when you want to wheedle something out of me. Cupboard love! That's what I call it!"

And the voice that edits private history set out on a new trail

" You're just like your father," it taunted. " He'd let his wretched relations eat me out of house and home! They'd claw the rags off my back if I'd let them," and I could see how my mother drew close her comfortable wrap.

" Not me! If I hadn't any self-respect they'd all be living here, and I and my children out in the streets begging our bread, I _dare_ say! No, thank you.

" But you're all alike-- the whole bunch of you. Here I slave myself to the bone morning, noon and night till I might as well drop dead at your feet for all the thanks I get-- it would serve you well right, too! "

Although I could understand enough of what the Voice was saying to gather its inconsequence, I was shattered, for its sound vibrations beset me with the rough-sheathed impact of a class whose loud self-assertion lifts them above the manual clatter of their lives, whose heritage it is to lack the mental leisure which alone, of all conditions, allows for the culture of such superficial graces as amenity, the expression of affection or the tempored rebuke, -- a class for generations so hard-driven they

64

had no time for loving their offspring.

In the years to come, I was to read in a newspaper which
may have been unreliable, that sound vibrations would be studied
by some War Office as the most deadly instrument of collective
destruction.

"Then you'll be contented," the voice went on, still
overcome with apprehension of being worn to death." But never
fear. I'll let the neighbors know the sort of life you lead me.
The world will point its finger at you. You'll be an outcast!"

Then it continued, after a short pause for breath, "So sly,
so underhand, always whining around for something. Nothing eve
satisfies you--- you needn't stand there gaping. Why aren't
you having your breakfast, if you please?"

"But I shan't let your father have his way and buy you a
mantle either --- all decked out in your frills and furbelows
like a duchess. And who are you, I'd like to know? A child who
has no fear of God! It's not surprising you won't obey your
mother. I wonder you're not ashamed to be so ungrateful."

On hearing these unexpected denunciations, my mind,
which normally should work forwards, reverted; set out on that
endless introvert journey in search of the motive attributed to
it --- imperceptible cause of a harrassing effect.

However, this preoccupation had not as yet entirely wiped
out my interest in the ceaseless appearance and vanishing of
green pixies and gnomes taking shape among the cretonne foliage
on the screen beside the bed.

"Haven't you any conscience at all? --" asked the voice,

65

probing the ganglions of my nerves and setting them all a-
jangle, " — with such a lovely home and kind parents to do
' everything of the best' for you— What more in the world
could you possibly want to make you happy? "

Although ere this the problem of happiness, whatever it
was, had never presented itself to me, I felt that this very
moment it was being irrevocably solved.

"But no, nothing is ever good enough for you, my fine lady
Look at those lovely boots I bought you only last winter—
pretending they hurt you — you grow like a weed that is no
good to anybody".

"What do you mean by leaving the room while your mother is
speaking— have you no respect?" the voice demanded, as I
shrank toward the door—

"I'd dress you in a potato-sack, if I had my way. That'd
knock some of the conceit out of you, you stiff necked genera-
tion! And you needn't think any one will ever marry you, either,
for all your idiotic father's wonderful plans— You, with your
foul mouth! I'll tell the young man what you are all right—
though it would be good riddance of *good* rubbish— I do declare

Disintegrated by the vibratory flux, I was quivering as
a heat haze might after the flame that engendered had gone out;
only for having listened to the fluency of British lane and
lowly hearthstone, a little sound theology and the philosophy
of thrift.

Change is not gradual; it is instantly that transformation
takes place. Destiny is a lightning calculator who will show

66

how the sum works out, subsequently, at great pains, in the
numerals of events.

Selfless, defenseless, abject with shame, I watched my
inborn equipoise recede among the shadows wondering over the
future of its sallow double, six-year-old me, left behind in life

"Don't you know that Satan takes people who use bad language and throws them in the fire? You'll burn for ever and ever".

"Couldn't I die" I enquired, anxiously.

"No, you wont be able to die--- and the fire hurts fearfully
so you cant bear it--- yet, you'll have to bear it, for it
will never, never end."

"But," I ponted out beseechingly, "I only said 'bother'
because I hurt my hand on the gas bracket."

My poor mother's myopic eyes peer at me with a somehow
thwarted suspicion." Don't try to tell me you didn't say---"

I could not catch the name of the crime I had been accused
of.

"Mark my words," the voice slowed down solemnly," No good
will ever come to you. Nothing will ever prosper with you."
There followed the supreme imprecation of heavy melodrama, "The
curse of your mother is upon you."

Then, in a more familiar manner, "Get out of my sight!"
shrieked the voice.

its

If only I could. But just all this sight one has to live
in, that, baring the spirit to the quick, leaves me defenseless
Another pair of predatory eyes is waiting for me in the dining
room. Governess' eyes that have never been kissed.

"Now let me see," says Miss Ware, consulting a list she

67

has prepared, " One mistake in spelling, four in arithmetic, three in history, two in grammar--- that makes ten pieces of punishment bread."

She sets my little body up against the table and watched as I stuff it perforce with the ten tremendous slabs of Hovs. Aridity absorbs saliver. My throat contracts. My stomach becomes delirious as the tawny pulp expands its way down, tedious as an inverted parturition.

When it is ended, my breakfast that has been waiting for me, begins. Lumpy porridge, wholesome burnt milk, a cold egg, the regulation amount of bread and butter.

With this ceaseless invasion of tepid volume, I swallow Miss Ware's desolation of a bondwoman whose primeval recollections are lying in a dingle with a naked body.

"That child is getting terribly anaemic," my father exclaims on catching sight of me, "Where's her tonic?" They manage to pry my mouth open and pour down some cod-liver oil.

He insists that my mother take me to the doctor. So we go in a cab to visit Sir Edward Seivkin, the Queen's physician his consulting room being as near to court as we can approach. My mother is rigid with his reverence as this awe-inspiring personage orders my left lung, or what he has found of it, to be planted immediately in a country farm. But having had our guinea's worth of society, all that the lung gets out of it is a stout push and "See what comes of disobeying your mother", as I bear it disconsolately down the front steps.

I must attend to myself.

Every child of that era was aware of what it meant to go

68

into a decline ' for they could not learn too early of the
consequence of wet feet or sitting in a draught-- and should
you be caught in the rain, will not the very drops as they
fall upon you arise as feathers? In a literature of smug
fatalism, the nicest ' children cross flickering finger
on a hollow torso draped in calico; and even longer girls lie
out at full length on the first disappointment in love.

These recumbent beings waning in the window among the
hyacinth bulbs, breathing ever faintly their genteel breath
and about to fly to heaven aroused my envy, I having caught
onto the fact that--- once in this world you have one way out.

Standing outside the housemaid's closet was a row of tall
cans she kept filled with cold water --- so much more water than
could ever seep in a shoe--- jugs just brimming with consumption.

It was easy to enveigle my sister out of bed. Warmth
itself is excelled by the tingle of being naughty. So we spent
the evenings on the landing and with the aid of tumblers she
pours the cold water all over my body under my cotton night-
gown. How enjoyable it is to shiver in defiance. As I paddle in
a puddle, death is become a practical joke on my elders.

I only renounced death when I happened upon eternity. One
night when we were out on this quest of tuberculosis, we found
a ladder in this same closet, left leaning against the cistern
I climbed it, and peered over the edge of a reservoir so near
the ceiling it hardly belonged to earth.

In this grey shadowy vat is a metal ball soldered to an
invisible support---an eroded orb on a bottomless water, like a
caviar speck, egg of some fish that is increase, afloat on

69

the face of doom.

Scarcely a cosmic spectacle. Yet in this waking survey of
my inanimate, silver somnambulists' world, I see it as a timeless
universe. It may be a microcosm awaiting the generation
of life, or a clinker of a burnt-out comet.

The cistern represents absolute depth as I cannot see to
the bottom of it. For me, the little leaden planet has the
blind patience of 'before life'. I am looking at a universe
that is not yet 'alive'. It either or has it some kind of liveness
in being immeasurably aloof? For me anything may come alive --
-- a doll, a picture -- I once laid a colored print on a meadow
under my feet on the carpet & went for a walk in the country.

As so often in those early years I could remember things
that must have been unknown to me, this, in spite of the stark
impossibility of its ever having been cognized by any circumscribed
consciousness, seems nevertheless familiar to me. Yet my possible
knowledge of the elementary fact of the world being round would
seem insufficient for evoking so great a concept from so trivial
an object.

Moreover this disproportionate disunited creation--- a planet
and its primordial aqueous surface--- which was what I surprisingly
recognised in the metal ball--- separate and incommesurate did
not make sense--- unless it comes clear, when we consider the
disregard for dimension and location shown in infant drawings
in which a bird may be bigger than the tree it perches upon or
rain more defined than a crowd of people watching a locomotive
travelling in the sky.

50) (70)

The wet calico stiffening on my body clothes me in a
dignity as cold as the dim vacuous peace of my secret planet
in the upstairs cistern; and perhaps because simplicity allows
for vastness, in looking at my symbolic universe, I feel I am
external to that which contains me and that somehow thereby I
become everlasting.

These clouds of cosmic fancy soon roll away, and this
plumber's orb reduces to a virgin playground---void,--- and
volcanoes and kingdoms spring up upon it ( can not a child bring
the whole of nature into the house with one sod of grass?) Now,
it is overrun by a superlative breed of people--- I am just about
to leap upon that planet myself to make merry among them, when it
strikes eleven.

Miss Ware, all this while sits with her book after her
lonely dinner in the school-room--- How inexact! Is she not this
very moment in Denmark--- " Here's rue for you", she reads, --
" our shepherds call them by a grosser name". Her cheeks are flushed
because mankind was once so young as to collaborate with spring.

She has had her door ajar to keep an ear on her sleeping
charges. But the queer rise and fall, the rumble and pitch of
points of view as opposite as the poles of the earth, pressing their
dynamic impact upon a closed diving room door, have prevented her
hearing our assassinative antics on the upper landing.

Peeping over the bannister, we see her coming up to bed. And
the blood-red splosh of her evening bodice mounts the staire in
the wake of the wet, white flash of myself making for the dark-
ness of the night-nursery at the top of the house.

Poor Miss Ware! My younger sister, who not being in the

71

habit of creating universes, sees so much more than I do of
what is going on, pretending to be asleep, watches the nurse-
ry governess undress. She sees her looking at her own nakedness
in the mirror, finding it pleasant. Was it her veneration of God,
or Victoria, that withheld this irreleasable prisoner from murde-
ring us, the other woman's children.

My English grandfather & grandmother were devoted. When t
they died they did so within a week of each other.

I was told how" Grandfather" - & I could see him as the
snowy white beard I remembered, bowing over his wife's coffin in
refusal to let it leave the cottage until he should accompany her
as he sat in his armchair beside her, immovable, unfed---" he
managed to expire in the nick of time.

It was a double funeral.

Apparently red with fury my poor mother, whose emotive
life was so rudimentary her sorrows & apprehensions unified in a
manifestation of perpetual rage, preparing rage to attend was
trying to sew a strip of black cloth on the machine.

It was not yet I should recall my vow when plucking the
shepherds-purse which had she known of it might have justified
that look of denunciation lodged in my mother's eyes beyond the
hump of a mechanised animal swiftly nibbling the outstreched
cloth.

Their observation twisted as usual my sensibility to a

5 72

drill boring the depths of my consciousness to locate

'what I had done'. The original evil these eyes accused

me of - was indefinable but for its suffocating pressure---

Standing submissively beside her as she innoculated me
with ' self accusation' I at the same time gathered that
Auntie Mary would spend the whole day in our house to look
after us while my mother buried her dead.

This Miss Gunne we were trained to call Auntie Mary was
a gentlewoman in reduced circumstances who had discreetly
advertised herself in the 'Ladies' Pictorial" as a 'Companion'

The mention of her name correlated a scatter of incidents
latent in my mind.

It evoked a brief respite in subliminal warfare , on first
being engaged to propound the ways of the world to my mother
she infused our constricted atmosphere with a little of the
fairy tale inconsequence traditional to english infancy. Among
other things she had instituted 'surprises' . My mother at
first responded hence her throwing of the blue valentines.

75

out from Blenheim Terrace I remarked to my governess "tomorrow
will be Good Friday - "Yes" she answered two hours later on our
return " Tomorrow will be Good Friday. After nights insomnolent
for toothache, the days insisted on their duration.

This day with Miss Gunn was a transformation. It was
spring. She allowed me to wear my slippers. She told us stories.
In her comforting society my body lightened; the solar plexus
unknotted as should an understanding saint visiting a prisoner w
who has no comprehension of the criminal automaton functioning
within him, through some sublime response bring momentarily to
the fore that image of God submerged in him, Mary b Maude without
a wand 'turned' me into ahappy child.

An unimaginable aroma drifted through the air.

With the perversity of chance, I found in this very heavenly
afternoon the occasion for my unique experience of what is now dis-
cussed as precocious sexuality in children.

We came under a lime tree in bloom, under a flowering dome
of pale green tassels raining a thousands scents.

In asweet assault of insect orchestra a cloud of bees
impinged their zumming chords on spurts of light. There was a sound
of shuttles of mobile air weaving a fabric of leaf-bud & pollen to
hold in suspension the travel of sun-light.

This tree alive with melodic fragrance shaken in interlaced
shimmer of ivory into jade, tuned to the pitch of deific nerves
dropped in its manifold animation soft translucent caterpillars
filled with verdant juice. Vertiginous, in falling they spun round
& round at the end of invisible lines in centrifugal counterpoint
to a collective undulation of sweet rhythm.

An aesthetic excitement stirred in my body a faint electric

76

nuclear response, a projection of the vibrant lime transplanted
within me, branches of nectar dripped through my torso & my limbs
--- a replica of the arboreal structure of the nervous system.

"Oh dear" I thought anxiously, "a caterpillar has
crawled up my inside."

Even the prudery of the inhabitants of a brick box cannot
prevent a little sex-enlightenment from creeping in.

I was a little over eight, sitting outside the night -
nursery at dusk with a little girl who had come to play with me in
our seaside' lodgings'. Entranced in the fantastic intercourse of
young creatures, we dangled our legs from a great big laundry bas-
ket we had preferred to the banal accomodation of the sedate.

"You're so silly," said my visitor whose interests had
revealed themselves as more realistic than my own," I bet you
don't even know where babies come from."

The jeering reflection of her remark, together with its
import, relating itself to an accusation often sprung upon me by
grown up people, I answered, "They found me under a stinging
nettle."

"Oh, you booby---", then she crowed, "I know how you
get them."

"Well, how do you get them," I asked her listlessly, not
particularly requiring one.

"Same as Christians," this child, to whom 'you' implied
'jew' assured me assertively.

"What!" just by saying 'Where 's Christians?'" I exclaimed
mistaking her words and confusing them with an occult invocation

77

akin to ' open Sesame' gleaned from some fairy-tale I cannot
recall, staring the while at a patch of light on the carpet to
watch the baby appear.

"No, stupid, I said Jews get babies the same way as Christians". Again this word that had gradually formed in me an impression of its being something that _did_ and at the same time _did not_ exist ---.

"What are Jews" ?

"Well, we just _are_," she explained, and started out on
my initiation.

The copulative prelude was most summarily dealt with.

"--- then the woman " continued my instructress" gets most terribly ill and writhes in agony for nine months and then the doctor comes to cut her open and takes ' it' out " ( Instantly everything inside me had congealed to an icy lump). But it hurts so badly that she almost always dies before he has time to sew her up again . " You see", she hooted in triumph , " I know more than you do",

The effect this information had upon me seems, now, dis-
proportionate in a child whose mentality was already stuffed with
hell and annihilating duty: the proof of whose existence was a
constant pain in my head.

But I get to look so very unwell that even others beside
my father took notice, and at last, when terror became irresis-
table, I ceded to my elders curiosities, but the matter being
too miserable for speech, I wrote out a statement with the stub
of a pencil. A child in horror of its origin begging for reassu-
rance. Alas, I had given my mother the opportunity to draw her-
self up to the very pinnacle of her superb morality.

78

"Now you are like a leper," she told me, degrading me with her righteous eyes, "Never, will you be able to look any one in the face again."

Secure in her immunity to the anathema heaped on a child who by chance surprises an unclean knowledge of which the monopoly being reserved for the adult, mysteriously endows them with superiority, she flaunted the anomolous comparison of her unassailable status that made me despicable. "Mind you guard your disgusting secret carefully--- Never breathe a word", and I felt I must hug it hopelessly to myself, live with it uncomforted and alone --- always while through the panic of my thoughts I heard the pitiless voice grind out," You are no longer fit to be left with other children!! "

At last the secret meaning that lay behind the ominous creating of those busks was revealed to me as the working of a relentless machinery, involving myself.

They're only dead men's heads in a dream - I assured myself for it would soon be time to go to bed.

"Through all their misfortunes they never lost sight of their origin," my father was saying to the governess. "We know who we are --- for four thousand years--- ". I was not free to pay attention to their palaver. "Massacres, renascences, emmigration --- bales of British cloth --- the priestly glory of his ancestors" were meaningless to me. My concern was to brace

79

myself to encounter the jibbering decapitations of the prophetic dark.

I could not listen if I would to the ritual he described, or reverence patriarchs, nor much wonder why, when speaking of juice, they should pronounce it jews ----. The hour when I must relinquish an upright realism for the horizontal surrender to an existence one cannot ' touch' was drawing too near.

ooofuunnnnnnnnnnn900

IN my dreams I an crossing a bridge with my German nurse whose head is covered with short chestnut curls --- an endless bridge spanning a shoreless sea that is turbid with red clay -- and Matilda is pointing upward in the air.

Out of this terra-cotta colored sea that it seems I must cross forever, there rises an interminable stake, out of the depths of the waters up through the foundations of the sky -- a breezelss brazen sky. And on this infinitely unabbreviated totem pole are growing oracular shoots --- Heads of ancients, like mummified rabbits of a type I have never seen -- their bearded irony drips from their salient cheek--ones under embedded fevered eyes surveying their issuant edicts as words to be weighed as gold-- Heads of patriarchs craning alive out of their world that is increate save for its axis. All prophesying at once, they conjure me to some enterprise obscure tob me.

I was afraid of falling asleep, for the patriarchs were recurrent; I knew when I should dream them, for as soon as the gas light was turned out, darkness showered red and yellow discs, showering in the clarts

80

like gory and golden money before my open eyes.

There was a 'different' dead man's head ' in another
dream that terrified me --- being unexpected in so usual an
environment ---

I would be opening a rickety door to the
chicken-run when a drift of snowy beard on the hard earth floor
stopped me. Buried up to its chin, which moved with difficulty
in mumbling, an old man's puzzled face stared up at me. Not so
much coming out of the earth as sinking in, my English grand-
father tries to convey some duty--- as though he were drawing me
into the ground with him --- I awaken in apprehension--.

If my dreams were strange, I also met with the monsters of
daylight, for as if the perfect craftsmanship of Nature is liable
to be taken too much for granted, her even process eliciting no
gratitude for her meticulous conformity to her own standard, she
will sometimes go on strike to give us a glimpse of the awful
phenomena that ensue when she allows her attention to wander for
a fraction of an embryonic second from her everlasting job.

Perhaps to remind us of this, Mr Barnum collects the mis-
shapen output of her abberations in the side shows of his circus,
or to alleviate the discontent of humanity for their average
shortcomings by showing us 'something worse', or to mystify chil-
dren allowed to take part in their parents amusements.

Roped in by a crimson cord--- an unfamiliar organization
of living forms I am not prepared for, presents an ill-assorted
pattern that, to my eyes, looks like a bodily lunacy, and it re-
quires some effort on the part of my unpracticed mind to see it
as actual substance.

81

Fraks† Parading on a platform. -- Human accidents dependent on the indelicacy of a crowd for bitter sustenance of the enforced suicide of their incongruous life.

The skeleton dude, sporting the derisive emptiness of his conventional evening dress, puffs wirely at a cigar the thickness of his arm; while beside him, the bearded lady 's silky appendage slided down dejectedly over the amber satin of her upholstered bosom. On a sign from the show-man, these two defecations of the creative clockwork ogle each other flittatiously, suggesting to the leering onlookers that, in defiance of fleshly standardization, grotesque inflammatory desires call from his attrophy to her excess.

Slowly we pass on.

A youth in ruby plush lowers his shame-worn eyes to his abdomen, and handles the rubbery legs of his unborn twin which tend to cling together because the cramped heels of foeti are crossed. Over and over again he pulls the creasy limbs of a babe apart to inform the ticket holders. To me, in my sickening pity, it appeared that this half body had taken a premeditated plunge to stick half way in the process of becoming, rather than ripen for the butchery of conscious life. I ached with the fateful hatred of the Freak for those legs of annihilation taking their static leap into the lasting exposure of his modesty; the cleaving of his stricken abdominal muscles.

Still we pass on ---

The air is astir with monotonous writhing. Four arms about two young and sorrowful heads, lifting enlacing, parting as they

82

strain for ease from their convulsive nearness; enlacing, par-
ting -- lifting as it were, a pearly imploration for release
^ to the tradition of heaven. Plush and gold encases the insea
perable torsoes of the siamese twins.

Now, at last, this pacing of torture is over, and I
return to the child-reality as we come to a great glass case
whose support is secretively draped with vevet reaching to the
ground. It contains a live lady with crimpy hair and bedecked
with diamonds. She is rocking cheerily on her hip, for from her
her waist down grow the metal scales of a fish-tail cocked up
behind her, a cold, hard, reassuring release from a surfeit of
erratic flesh.

These peccadillos of Nature's moments of absentmindedness
are closely resembled by the deformations of the spirit--

All I remember of a visit to 'Venice' at the 'Olympic'--
beside gondolas, the deathly blackness of pleasure-hearses
toppling across the oily waters of an artificial canal-- as a
vista of planked flboring, cleared for the passage of challen-
ging feet-- the swinging swish of tartan kilts.

Raising my head I saw they belonged to what now appears 4S
simply = a troup of scotch pipers playing a lively KKEK reel--
but this is how they looked and sounded KKEK to me then.

These kilted pipers are blowing into the parched legs
of dead men, and have stuck hurtful wooden tubes into them; they
have tied up withered skin round the one end of the tubes and
hold the other end with the new clear skin of their cruel mouths
The souls of the dead men are imprisoned in their mummied legs

83

which writhe and swell as the living blow their devastatingly
live breath into them and their souls shriek out in torture
and terror -- while the big bodies of my elders straggling
around them impel me to this deathly orgy by my throbbing
wrists held in their ineludable claws of dominion.

It has taken me some time to discover of what material
I could have formed this ghastly illusion; but at last I remem-
bered a fancied resemblance of bagpipes to -- smoked hams, to-
gether with the somewhat human misery of their squeals.

The last of the enternments to obsess me was an early
electric power plant open to the public view at Earle Court
Exhibition. That always only half acquiescent participant, a
child, I trail along behind my mother and the nurse, Stirred to
an uneasy premonition of the coming mechanized world by weird
sparks and flashes flying from the slip and slang of enigmatic
engines, I decide it is imprudent to expose the working of such
magic to unprepared eyes.

In the dream I shall dream that night, I meet again
with that steel swish and arc-lit iteranne of a nerveless
automatism engendering exiled moons.

I drag at my mother's towering skirts to entreat her to
come away -- she takes no heed -- Suddenly this dream mother
comports herself in the wildest way --She is flinging her arms
up, and at once they become steely arms -- She is changing --

8# (84)

turning--- changes into a dressmaker's dummy of ringing metal
--- `хикхххххр`--- with expandible bust--- the abdomen full
as the curving breast of Lohengrin's oncoming swan . There,
where the skirts should have been, all that upholstery dissem-
bling the site of sin--- is a forbidding cage of iron wire. It
rasps my fingers that have clutched at it for protection, ---
a protection I now require against `hyself`, the very author of
my being--- being author of my fear--- twirls from my fingers---
twirls, spins, spins to a trankparent bobbin of intense rota-
tion.

This fetish of maternity gloats in preposterous peals
of derision, while her face dissolves---

And this was the last of my nightmares --- asleep.

73

This peaceful interlude dispersed. Like 'real' relations she was 'forbidden the house'. Never would my mother, her self-respect outraged, speak to her again. Auntie Mary, the silly thing, had theories on family life. Within a period of several years, Mary Maud Gunne provided my sole familiarity with culture.

Round the corner from the sweet-shop where I had met my great-grandmother Mary Maude's bell was set in a gate post so low I could pull it when outraged.

Once I visited her. I was again running away. Set out to seek my future in a peculiar land I could see distinctly. Void as the desert for my lack of imagination two tees like planed poles, each bearing its single enormous fruit, the one a pear, the other an apple were planted vis-vis without further incident. The trees of an unattainable knowledge in my empty promised land. I had transpOXKised them from the rosey branches of fruit dividing vigneted groups of figures on the same wall-paper in the night nursery - wherein before daylight I had scooped out prime-eval caves.

But this included a great many X's. My mother knew that there were many more X's than there were Y's, and she kept track of them.

The X-in

75

out from Blenheim Terrace I remarked to my governess "tomorrow
will be Good Friday - "Yes" she answered two hours later on our
return " Tomorrow will be Good Friday. After nights insomnolent
for toothache, the days insisted on their duration. In the晚景
This day with Miss Gunn was a transformation-. It was
spring. She allowed me to wear my slippers. She told us stories.
In her comforting society my body lightened; the solar plexus
unknotted as should an understanding saint visiting a prisoner w
who has no comprehension of the criminal automaton functioning
within him, through some sublime response bring momentarily to
the fore that image of God submerged in him, Mary Maude without
a wand 'turned' me into a happy child.

In a sweet assault of insect orchestra a cloud of bees
impinged their zumming chords on spurts of light. There was a sound
of shuttles of mobile air weaving a fabric of leaf-bud & pollen to
hold in suspension the travel of the sun-light.

This tree alive with melodic fragrance shaken in interlaced
shimmer of ivory-into-jade, tuned to the pitch of deific nerves
dropped in its manifold animation soft translucent caterpillars
filled with verdant juice. Vertigoïous, in falling they spun round
& round at the end of invisible lines in centrifugal counterpoint
to a collective undulation of sweet rhythm.

77

"No, stupid, I said Jews get babies the same way as Christians". Again this word that had gradually formed in me an impression of its being something that did and at the same time did not exist ---.

"What are Jews" ?

"Well, we just are," she explained, and started out on my initiation.

The copulative prelude was summarily dealt with.

"--- then the woman" continued my instructress" gets most terribly ill and writhes in agony for nine months and then the doctor comes to cut her open and takes ' it' out" ( Instantly everything inside me had congealed to an icy lump). But it hurts so badly that she almost always dies before he has time to sew her up again. " You see", she hooted in triumph, " I know more than you do",

The effect this information had upon me seems, now, disproportionate in a child whose mentality was already stuffed with hell and annihilating duty: the proof of whose existence was a constant pain in my head.

But I got to look so very unwell that even others beside my father took notice, and at last, when terror became irresistible, I ceded to my elders curiosities, but the matter being too miserable for speech, I wrote out a statement with the stub of a pencil. A child in horror of its origin begging for reassurance. Alas, I had given my mother the opportunity to draw herself up to the very pinnacle of her superb morality.

79

ooocccccccccccccc

IN my dreams I am crossing a bridge with my German nurse whose head is
covered with short chestnut curls --- an endless bridge spanning
a shoreless sea that is turbid with red clay -- and Matilda is poin-
ting upward in the air.

Out of this terra-cotta colored sea that it seems I must
cross forever, there rises an interminable stake, out of the depths
of the waters up through the foundations of the sky -- a breezeless
brazen sky. And on this infinitely unabbreviated totem-pole are
growing oracular shoots -- Heads of ancients, like mummified
rabbits of a type I have never seen -- their bearded irony drips
from their salient cheek-bones, under embedded fevered eyes survey
their issuant edicts as words to be weighed as gold-- Heads
of patriarchs craning alive out of their world that is increas-
save for its axis. All prophesying at once, they conjure me to
some enterprise obscure to me.

80

There was a 'different' dead man's head' in another
dream that terrified me --- being unexpected in so usual an
environment ---

I would be opening a rickety door to the
chicken-run when a drift of snowy beard on the hard earth floor
barred me. Buried up to its chin, which moved with difficulty
in mumbling, an old man's puzzled face stared up at me. Not so
much coming out of the earth as sinking in, my English grand-
father tries to convey some duty--- as though he were drawing me
into the ground with him --- I awaken in apprehension--.

Roped in by a crimson cord--- an unfamiliar organization
of living forms I am not prepared for presents an ill-assorted
pattern that, to my eyes, looks like a bodily lunacy, and it re-
quires some effort on the part of my unpracticed mind to see it
as actual substance.

81

FREAKS! Parading on a platform. -- Human accidents de-
pendant on the indelicacy of a crowd for bitter sustenance of the
*ostracised,*
enforced suicide of their incongruous life.

The skeleton dude, sporting the derisive emptiness of his
conventional evening dress, puffs wirily at a cigar the thick-
ness of his arm; while beside him, the bearded lady's silky
appendage slides down dejectedly over the amber satin of her
upholstered bosom. On a sign from the show-man, these two defec-
tions of the creative clockwork ogle each other flippatively,
suggesting to the leering onlookers that, in defiance of fleshly
standardization, grotesque inflammatory desires call from his
attrophy to her excess.

Slowly we pass on.

A youth in ruby plush lowers his shame-worn eyes to his ab-
domen, and handles the rubbery legs of his unborn twin which tend
to cling together because the cramped heels of foeti are crossed.
Over and over again he pulls the creasy limbs of a babe apart to
inform the ticket holders. To me, in my sickening pity, it appea-
red that this half-body had taken a premeditated plunge to stick
*mid* half way in the process of becoming, rather than ripen for the
butchery of conscious life. I ached with the fateful hatred of the
Freak for those legs of annihilation taking their static leap into
the lasting exposure of his modesty; the cleaving of his stricken
abdominal muscles.

Still we pass on ---

82

1
strain for ease from their convulsive nearness; enlacing, par-
ting -- lifting as it were, a pearly imploration for release
-- to the tradition of heaven. Plush and gold galore,
perable torsoes of the Siamese Twins.

Now, at last, this pacing of torture is over, and I
return to the child-reality as we come to a great glass case
whose support is secretively draped with vevet reaching to the
ground. It contains a live lady with crispy hair and bedecked
with diamonds. She is rocking cheerily on her hip, for from her
her waist down grow the metal scales of a fish-tail cocked up
behind her, a cold, hard, reassuring release from a surfeit of
eratic flesh.

These peccadillos of Nature's moments of absentmindedness
are closely resembled by the deformations of the spirit--,

All I remember of a visit to 'Venice' at the 'Olympia'--
beside gondolas, the deathly blackness of pleasure-hearses
toppling across the oily waters of an artificial canal-- as a
vista of planked flooring, cleared for the passage of challe-
ging feet-- the swinging swish of tartan kilts.

Raising my head I saw they belonged to what now appears
simply as a troup of scotch pipers playing a lively kiffi reel--
but this is how they looked and sounded kiffi to me then.

83

The last of the enterments to obsess me was an early
electric power plant open to the public view at Earle Court
Exhibition. That always only half acquiescent participant, a
child, I trail along behind my mother and the nurse. Stirred to
an uneasy premonition of the coming mechanized world by weird
sparks and flashes flying from the slip and lang of enigmatic
engines, I decide it is imprudent to expose the working of such
magic to unprepared eyes.

84 (84)

turning--- changes into a dressmaker's dummy of ringing metal
--- ξηκωσηκωσηκωση -- with expandible bust--- the abdomen full
as the curving breast of Lohengrin's oncoming swan . There,
where the skirts should have been, all that upholstery dissem-
bling the site of sin--- is a forbidding cage of iron wire. It
raaps my fingers that have clutched at it for protection, ---
a protection I now require against itself, the very author of
my being--- being author of my fear--- twirls from my fingers---
twirls, spins, spins to a transparent bobbin of intense rotat-
tion.

father who will spend his time doing
the same thing over and over, is reading the daily Telegraph-- Once
a newspaper, always a newspaper.

Why go on staring at it? I am after something new! His legs
are crossed, and the toe of one of his carpet slippers is pointing a
woolen cross-stitch red moss-rose straight at a work table. There
is a fancy basket standing on I have not seen before.

I find that this basket contains some fat white glass-eyed
fishes with aniline pink painted scales, and ribs on their fins; soft
as cotton-wool, they have a thin crisp surface-- it is as if my hands
were full of a light warm snow.

Father looks out from behind his paper and remarks confi-
dentially, "We mustn't tell Auntie Mary you peeped at her Japanese
fishes. She meant them for a surprise."

" Islands in the Air "

55

TO 8 4

CHAPTER VII

The master who will spend his time doing the same thing over and over, is reading the daily Telegraph --- Once a newspaper, always a newspaper. Why go on staring at it? I am after something new! His legs are crossed and the of one of his carpet slippers is pointing a woolen cross-stitch straight at a work table. There is a fancy basket standing on it I have not seen before.

The master looks out from behind his paper and remarks confidentially, " We musn't tell Auntie Mary you peeped at xher Japanese fishes . She meant them for a surprise."

That evening when my nurse brought me into the drawing room, the powerful masses of Miss Gunne and my parents were grouped round the fireplace. The black bars of the grate withheld a pile of glowing jewels from falling upon their feet while I advanced towards a wall of flame. I could feel these great dark silhouettes as they sat there in the dusk to be concerned in an intention to spring upon me. They were flashing messages to each other in a code of connivance.

56

"Did you peep into Aunty Mary's basket?" asked
me, and his eye reflected a hot gleam from a burning coal.

As if this word were a signal confidently awaited, the
upper halves of their bodies bolted out of their huge arm-chair
The rosy gleam on Miss Gunne's white hair, the copper edge of
the martens
crinkly beard, and the embers in my mother's eye-
glasses hung over me as supernatural embodiments of destiny
might lean menacing out of an incongruously low sky.

"That's a lie", exclaimed in a voice of chuck-
ling severity, appreciative of a scene he had evidently prepare
with his companions. "You know very well I saw you do it mys
elf."

The word'lie' seemed to release their sonority, and the
voice I had heard for the first time when the dominoe mira-
culously flew through the window gathered in volume above the
staccato of the other voices' chattering of hell. It no longer
detonated on a lofty plane. Now it was hissing out of a real
person while I was quite really a bit of a person and the fire
was hot on my face.

A lie was obviously the contrary of what actually 'occurs'
I had said 'No' in compliance with the request. If I
did not remind him that he had asked me not to tell, it was
something
because I succumbed their necessity to make out of me that they
knew how to'deal with it. (Does not society create its own
criminals?) Or rather because animosity always stabbed me in

57

the solar plexus, causing a knotted agony that paralyzed self-defense. All I could realize was the impossibility of extricating myself intact from intrigues in which I found myself very much in the situation of foot-ball in rugby scrimmage.

I must make my escape. So I merely told them I could stay with them no longer ---that I was going away.

Obligingly, the front door was opened for me --- I rushed out and ran along Melville Terrace. On the one hand stood a row of brown-brick houses, one of which was mine. On the other, a demi-luneof thickly planted lilac trees hedged the curved drive that swept in and out of the gates.

As I breathed the drip of the lately fallen rain loaded with the aroma of the lilacs, its freshening of the pebbles in the gravel, the balm of earth had already begun to heal the concussion of my nerve centers in this atmosphere so different in nature to the one that filled the brown brick box I had left--- when a heavy arresting hand clamped itself on my frail shoulder--- they did want a liar.

The ultimate difficulty of ascribing guilt to the proper quarter necessitated the conception of the devil --- for however we may search for the inspiration of that evil which gets mysteriously mixed up with so many of our deeds, we can seldom locate it. It is seemingly the result of impersonal causes over which we have little control.

B 58

Thus the riddle as to how, at any time, and unwittingly,
innocence may change into guiltiness came up again when one
Autumn Sunday afternoon good-looking master, faultlessly
dressed, indulged in a much - earned pleasure of taking his dear
little girl for a walk.

On our return, he complained of how I had laid me down
on the pavement and, kicking and screaming, demanded to be
taken home in a hansom cab. I took great interest in my father's
narrative, listening open - mouthed as if to an account of the
incredible performance of some stranger; I was quite as horrified
as were my elders by this evil deed. I had not the least recol-
lection of the hideous occurence --- did not even know if my
father had succeded in getting me home without a cab or whether
he hailed one to bear him away with his utter confusion. Yet,
contrary to the time when the window' got ' broken or when I told
a ' lie ', I was not bewildered by the accusation. It left me
undisturbed except for a slight remorse. No stab of injustice
wounded my solar plexus for, in spite of having immediately
forgotten what I had done, I knew that all the master was saying
about me was strictly true. So if my sort of extra-dimensional
existence is a thing of the past, it appears I am capable of a
new and stange automatism whose actions, as if beyond my control,
are contrary to the ethical consciousness I had supposed to be
the only one I possessed, and that this unsuspected automat
within me had begun to sin. It seemed that this sin was the
desire to identify myself with beauty, the beauty of the jingling
swiftness of a cab on two wheels. But what was the nature of a

59

desire that could fling me down on the stone lid of a civilized
earth as one possessed of a devil, a desire that could scream
for a jaunty conveyance which, half an hour later, I could not
recall having coveted, an impulse whose consequence must be
related by some body else for me to get even a second hand
spectator's impression that I had ever harbored it. The one thing
I remembered, and that ineffaceably, was the way the hard stone
of the pavement seemed to attenuate and fuse with the mist that
was lowered upon it, as if of itself giving off in a sort of static
steam the hushed lethargic opacity of a respectable London street
on a Sunday afternoon in late autumn.

60

so that the fairies positively pleaded with me to save them
on the side of my plate ---- but I soon discovered that all
peas have mouths.

Bearing directly on the episode of the staircase was
the affection I had developped for lost causes. It seemed
shamefully unfair to me, for instance, that such general
preference should be shown for the right-hand side. I would
pick up the left-hand side with my sensibility and nurse it in
my astral arms like a doll, croon to it and make ugly faces
on its behalf at the aristocratic right that axm gave itself
such airs. For this, it was my right leg that was swung in the
air, I allowing myself insofar as possible the use of only
left hand things; it was wearing my left hand shoe, by the way,
for its greater humiliation.

I swung and hummed, watching the housemaid who knelt at
the foot of the staircase ' putting back the rods' ---- when
suddenly she capped her hands to her face and screamed,
" you wicked gal, I'll tell yer mar you kicked me in the eye".

This was extraordinary, for I had had no sensation like
the one I dimly remembered of being able to take contact with
objects out of my reach, and I looked at that space between me
and the housemaid to see if it had fits of folding up. It
never budged. As for my leg, it had now for some time remai-
ned at the normal length of about one stair and a half. No,
there it was, the same as usual, wearing the gaiter that
had brought me into the world. The whole thing remained inex-
plicable until when, some decades later, I came to write it

61

down.

The early summer evening was so shiny, and, exceptionally, this nurse so tender and consolatory, I could not be sure if I felt impelled to enfever this serenity with that moral turpitude incessantly attributed to me, if I was making a noisy bid for further demonstrations of a rare affection, or whether, in consequence of my cerebral routine, my mind had already begun to conform automatically to a rhythm of recurrent culpability.